blog

Oh sweet Honduras, it’s been only weeks that I’ve met you and yet I am profoundly in love. Just like your majestic neighbor Nicaragua last year, you have conquered my heart. I cannot comprehend you although I try to understand; I admire your beauty but am allowed to love you only from afar; I can never penetrate your depths. The more elusive a jewel you are to me the more attractive you become.

Your richer sisters, some of them with illustrious names like Switzerland, United States of America or European Union, do not sincerely love you. They like to sneak in to steal your wealth; they pick your bananas and your coffee, only to pay you a pittance. They do not deign to look at you for who you are. You are Cinderella and they pretend to be the real daughters. Have they forgotten how that fairy tale comes to an end?

I have found your glass slipper and it fits, for you are the most wondrous. When I’m strolling your beaches you let me wallow in your waves and build private castles from your sand. You and I are alone because the others are at the vulgar Atlantic resorts, the superior Côte d’Azur or brain-dead in Ibiza. When I wander about your mountains you welcome me into your lap. You raise me up so that I can look over your prettiness and smell your virginal innocence. Your forest protects me from the rain, your jungle sounds melt away in my silence. Then we are alone again. You smell like blossom, fresh and unpolluted. You are so gorgeous but so disorganized, your chaos crushes your logic, the heat beats your will to work, but your passion for love is stronger than money and I can sense that you are happier than your richer sisters. The longer I am with you, the more mystical you grow and the more you sparkle as an elusive jewel.

I could shout it over the rooftops but I whisper so the rest of the world cannot hear, for fear to lose you to the masses: “Oh sweet Honduras, I love you so”.

Last weekend I went to the sea. I had decided to go to the beach with Oscar and Carlos – the two little pizza feast brothers – and their younger sister Alejandra. It’s less than an hour by bus but none of them had ever been that far and the continuous flow of mysterious stories had intrigued them. Stories telling that someone had generously sprinkled salt in the water, that one could see the end of the world from there, that some such thing as a wave existed and that certain rich people paid buckets full of money to fight over a feet of sand with thousands of others. They called it going on holiday.

Anji, my American girlfriend who was volunteering in the orphanage, had become curious after all my tales about the street urchins, who, as I assured her, were definitely much worse off than the Monchichis. Together we walked to our meeting point, where only Oscar was to be found.

Carlos and Alejandra had to work – only six and eight years old! – so we would be a threesome that day. Anji and I felt slightly uncomfortable being with the kid without his playmates but Oscar himself clearly didn’t bother. Oscar had set his mind on the sea and he was going to get his way, with or without his siblings.

He roams the streets in a ripped rag, a buttock dangling outboard, and I decided that a new wardrobe was the least I could offer for such a weighty event as a first encounter with the sea.

T-shirts, socks, underpants, swimming trunks, it was all purchased in a matter of minutes. Three of each, one per child. At less than two euros (or two dollars) a t-shirt it is tempting to buy a carload and dress them for the next couple of years, but experience proves this technique to be wrong.

As soon as a parent finds out that the child has more than the essential single set of clothes, all the rest is sold. After all, money buys food and having more clothes than you can wear at the same time is a luxury that they cannot afford. If you live on the streets you are not better off, with extra clothes, you will certainly lose your second pair of socks to a stronger and bigger kid, or you’ll trade in your extra trousers for a meal as soon as the hunger pains shout down the pleasure from the clothes.

When you are ten years old and you have never yet been offered a present, not even for your birthday, of course you cry when you are given a brand new t-shirt, and one can imagine the pain you feel if your mother snatches it away from you to sell it. I understood I had to go carefully.

Oscar nevertheless had to have a jeans at any price. I was strongly against this, but once he had put a black pair on, seven sizes too large, he obstinately refused to take them off. After some fierce negotiations, the price was agreed 11 euros (11 dollars), a fortune for a pair of trousers in this country, and I was strongly opposed to the deal but the kid broke out in hysteria when I said I didn’t feel like buying it.

Moments later, we were sitting on my terrace eating cornflakes, Anji and I inquired why he had insisted so ferociously in order to get those particular jeans. ‘My daddy wore exactly the same on the day he died’, Oscar cheerfully replied, his hands rubbing his new purchase. Right; having lost my father as a young boy myself, that spoke directly to my heart. I was overjoyed that I had been persuaded and passionately hoped that mummy wouldn’t exchange it for a sac of beans.

He was babbling nervously about his mother every fifteen minutes anyway, but even Anji, whose Spanish is significantly better than mine, couldn’t manage to find out why he was so scared that she would hit him once he got back home.

It had also taken quite some power of persuasion to make the lad sit at the table and get him to calmly spoon up his cornflakes. I know very well now that these children suffer severe hunger. Not like me when I need to wait for my meal for an hour or so, but hunger with a capital H. If begging and stealing work out badly for a day, you don’t eat, it’s that simple.

Nevertheless I was deeply shocked when I witnessed the scene that took place in front of my refrigerator. Desperately Oscar looked at me and when I shamefully nodded yes, he leaped to the door like a wild beast, a gluttonous glance in his eyes, jerked it open, grabbed inside and started ripping up raw slices of ham and salami with his teeth. He carelessly slopped the milk around while pulling it out to wolf down the meat before throwing himself on the cheese. It looked like a surrealistic play especially performed to demonstrate to us how agonizing real Hunger must be. Only after the worst pangs were staunched could he start thinking about what he actually liked.and while writing this down I relive all those hunger scenes I have witnessed over the past weeks.

‘Hungry, Bas, I am so Hungry’, I can hear Walter whisper with his weak voice. Walter is a glue-sniffing lad, about thirteen years old, and he has his own bench in the park on which no one else is ever allowed to doss down, because he put some cardboard box on it to make it sleep super-soft. You can also eat that in emergencies because it is reasonably digestible. I don’t know if they actually do this, I’ve only been told so.

Every night when I leave the internet-café, I have a tough choice to make. Should I ride my bike right around a block and head home undisturbed, or choose the shortcut through the park with every possibility of being tackled by some of the boys? The latter means listening to tales of woe, spending money at food stalls, handing out hugs and bidding good night with a lump in my throat. Sometimes I’m in a selfish mood or I simply cannot face the situation, sometimes love prevails and I opt for the park route. Walter or Nelson or that sweet sick Jonatàn or Gluey Lewy, invariably turn up, and equally invariably, I surrender. They are amazingly hungry for affection for youths of their age, but when I put my arms around them and press their heads against my chest, I can sense that it is not a hug of greeting but one with a remarkable mixture of feelings. I can simultaneously feel their total abandonment as well as the panic caused by solitude and despair. Jonatàn sometimes stands like that for a whole while, his lice-ridden mop of hair only inches from my nose, his arms flabbily around my waist, just to absorb some love and human warmth, which he so cruelly lacks.

Cornflakes all finished.and Oscar leaves for what to him is an amazing bus trip to the end of the world, less than an hour from here. When the long awaited moment came and he finally met the sea, he could only stand in rapture. ‘Wow, so huge, so huge’, he whispered awe-struck, motionless and silently staring over the water; a rare pose for a usually restless child.

We have savored the day, all three of us. Oscar was flabbergasted that food was abundantly and constantly present, he adored the speedboat which we first couldn’t talk him into and later not talk out off, but most of all he enjoyed simply being a child for once. Anji and I, in turn, savored him. The way he tasted the water six times at least to check if it was still salty, the way he defiantly flung on the floor every bite of his fish meal that did not please him, in the most sophisticated restaurant in town, but especially the child that we saw blossoming in front of our eyes.

Nevertheless, the thought of his mother kept playing on his mind and we gladly used the translation skills of a black Honduran lady who lived in Houston to clarify the mystery. The truth soon came out, on Saturdays mum made him beg and if he did not bring enough cash home she beat him black and blue. Finally it dawned upon me why he always ducked away like a dog with his tail between his legs whenever I made a sudden move. Lacking a father, his mother had taken over the battery.

Insisting that I would give him double the sum of an average begging day’s yield was useless, the belief that someone was actually offering to care for him was too much to grasp. Only once back at my place, with the money in his hand, an expression of sheer joy illuminated his face for a moment.

When I seated him on the bus home, sadness overwhelmed me. That little boy, knee-high to a grasshopper, with a bulky bag of clothes on his shoulders and a banknote clasped in his fist, heading for more misery. He looked round and seemed surprised that I appeared as grieved as he was.

Monday at the Patio he flaunted the pair of black jeans as proud as a peacock. To my question if he had been beaten, he blandly replied: ‘No way man, course not, as long as she gets the bucks she leaves me alone!’

Recently I have visited the women’s jail. A group from the church goes there weekly to offer the women, (who are often imprisoned for a scandalously long time for ridiculously small offences), moral support and legal aid, as far as one can speak of law in this insane state. I only went there once, out of curiosity about the dreadful circumstances under which the women live, and in order to get a picture of the ins and outs of jail life when sharing a 10ft by 10ft cell with nine others. I tried, sneakily, to smuggle my camera inside but unfortunately had to leave it behind after a thorough body search, despite my best efforts to charm the officer in charge.

‘How much more time you think you’ll have to do? I asked one of the ladies, in some awe. She had served her time eight months ago but was still not released, due to administrative red-tape and some changes in civil service. ‘As long as God wants me to’ was the unbelievably simple answer. First I thought I had misunderstood, but after asking for clarification, I was assured that indeed, she was going to stay as long as God wanted her to. Talk about fatalism.

Once back outside, seated on a stone in the 98 F (37 C) shade with my three church mates, we had to wait for the bus. One of them was a cheery black lady with a generous bosom and a fine head of frizzy hair. Another was a giant of a woman, bigger than me, draped in some kind of tent with a flowery pattern and unpleasantly smelling of days-old sweat. She had travelled an hour and a half to proclaim the word of Jesus for twenty minutes, and had to do another hour and a half to get back home. Once again, I couldn’t avoid the Honduran’s ever-recurring question: “how Christian are you?”

Now, at the moment I’m in a transitional period from absolute atheism to an increasingly deep spiritual life without adhering to any conventional belief system, which makes answering that particular question a dicey business.

I once replied that I am a non-believer but apart from this being a lie by now, my interrogator suddenly choked on his soda and ran out of the room, so I consider it wiser not to give this answer again.

Then I have tried several times to give the true version, saying that I grew up as an atheist but that I’ve been practicing meditation for a few years and that my spiritual development is constantly evolving, but this only led to confusion.

Surrounded by the three sweet ladies I decided to gamble and try another variant, without stretching the truth too much: ‘I am a Buddhist!’

Jaws dropped, eyes opened wide, silence was profound: ‘But you do pray, don’t you?’ asked the large lady in the flowery dress, panting from the heat, who to my surprise was the first to recover from the initial shock.

‘Mmmmm, I withdraw into deep concentration every day to come in contact with myself and with the Divine.’

‘So you do believe in God’ sharply commented the black lady with the frizzy hair.

My poor Spanish was clearly letting me down now, but what I meant to say went more or less like this: ‘I am convinced that every human being bears a tiny part of God within and that all together we form the Divine. You can kindle a little light inside and as that little light becomes brighter through practice you are given more clarity, more insight and you will come closer to the Divine within. The more light you find, the more you can live and give in love and joy and the better you can eliminate the darkness of your fears and unhappiness.’

Although I found some echo among the ladies, suspicion could still be sensed in the next question: ‘So you believe that every human being bears this divine light inside?’
‘Yes, everybody’
‘The poor too?’
‘Even the rich!’
‘And bad people?’
‘Bad people as well’
‘Hitler?’
‘Hitler also, but he has never found his light switch and as long as you live in enough darkness you are capable of the most bestial deeds’.

By now disbelief had definitely defeated curiosity and the ever more strongly perspiring flower dress woman cleverly, though abruptly, manoeuvred the conversation to safer topics. That safer doesn’t necessarily mean without risk was soon to be revealed.

‘What kind of animals do you tend to back home?’

From experience in Latin America I am aware that this contains a catch question especially designed for unsuspecting Westerners. It is simply a hidden way to discover the wealth of one’s company. The general idea is that the larger the animals and the more numerous, the richer the family is. Now the fact is that my family, or more accurately my mother, has a small pasture in which since time immemorial some geese, goats and chickens live their lives peacefully grazing, while my mother does not, in exchange, lay claim on their flesh, eggs or milk to make money out of them.

My western naiveté made me think that I could not possibly be considered a show-off simply because my mother looks after a handful of small stock, so in all my innocence I merrily stated: ‘In my family we are goat shepherds’.

Admiration and envy fell to me.

‘Wowee!’ exclaimed the joyous one with the greying frizzy hair, ‘then you must be tremendously rich!’

‘Not at all’ I indignantly objected. ‘In Europe cows and pigs are far more expensive and we don’t have any of those, so I’d have thought we’re rather wretched.’… to which came the following magisterial answer, entirely shutting me up: ‘Yeah, of course, here too those are much more costly but you don’t weigh them in pounds whereas with goats you do!’ I have spent quite some time trying to figure out the logic behind this reply but so far what it meant remains a mystery.

Doggedly, I sat waiting for the rescuing sound of the bus, but, of course it took forever to arrive and I was continuously being grilled.

‘How many goats do you tend to?’ the woman in the increasingly smelly dress wanted to know, no longer making a secret of her jealousy. We have three but because of her jealousy and my own discomfort with the whole interrogation I was inclined to boast. Giving way to temptation, I said we had seven. As I could have guessed, the Wiersma family was labelled as extravagantly wealthy.

At once, my egoistic desire to brag turned into shame. I decided to keep to myself that we have six fat chickens as well. The word goose I do not know in Spanish and it is better that way, geese are probably reserved for the upper class’s Christmas dinner..and in the distance I could hear the welcome hooting of the bus.