Harvest Day

The corn was thick in the air as we walked up to Amigos' maize field. Like a display of fireworks, the ears hit their peak and gradually descended, each at a different moment.

It was harvesting day for Amigos' maize (corn) and all the jovenes, or teenaged, boys at the hogar had been enlisted to help. The 20 of them worked their way in a pack up and down the field, a row at a time. The dried out ears had to be pulled off and then catapulted to the nearest of several large piles that had been cleared out in the midst of the stalks. In nearly two acres of corn there were five or six piles, and that's why the corn flew through the sky at such a great height. It's also why, despite the heat, several of the boys seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Maize is what we gringos know as yellow corn, several months later. At the point where sweet corn would be ready to harvest, the stalks are doubled over and allowed to dry out for several more weeks. Once harvested, the hard, dry maize kernels are ready to be ground into the flour that constitutes the tortillas eaten at every meal - two tortillas a person, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The maize we harvested that day, in grains, weighed 4,500 pounds, enough for six months worth of tortillas here at the hogar.

Beginning at 8 a.m., the boys and other employees of Amigos' agricultural program, Agro as it's referred to here, were at work pulling the brown, crinkly maize cobbs off of doubled-over, waist-high stalks. The sun was fiercely strong by 9 a.m. and the work is best done in long pants and sleeves, since the dried stalks are prickly and scratchy, sometimes dangerously sharp, and lots of creatures (read snakes) like to live in the field. 

It's unsurprising that among the-high schoolers, there were those who didn't relish the hard work. What's more surprising is that some of them did. When I asked one of them why, he said throwing the ears the distance to the piles was fun, and that he liked seeing how far he could throw. Then he gave a reason I didn't expect. He said he also liked walking from plant to plant, pulling the corn off the stalks. To me, a first-time maize harvester, this seemed like the least fun part of the job. My legs and arms were scratched and itchy and I was constantly worried about what insect I would see next crawling out of a corn ear. Sweat was pouring down my face and I had a bloody gash on one hand from an especially sharp stalk. Harvesting maize is brutally hard work and that's the daily reality for many Honduran farmers, one that really struck me in the field. But this kid also saw the beauty in the process. He was able, even in a long-sleeved shirt drenched in sweat, to appreciate the kind of satisfaction harvesting your own food can bring.

Amigos uses about eight acres of farmland. Currently the hogar produces all its own milk, chicken, maize, and beans. Beans will be planted next in the same field as the maize. There are two harvests a year for both crops and each plant replenishes the soil for the next in a beautiful, ageless cycle. The boys at the hogar who work in the agro program are learning about a crop and a cycle that has been a staple in the lives of Hondurans for generations. I learned a saying in my first week here that is catchy in Spanish: Sin maíz, no hay país, which basically translates to, the country falls apart without maize.

We walked back from the field dehydrated and exhausted, at least I was, but also on a strange sort of high, the kind that comes from doing a hard job through to the end. The boys were making whooping noises for no reason, giddily laughing. The tortillas at lunch that day didn't taste quite the same.

A Day in the Life (Part 2)

We left off at 2:10, the end of the school day. Usually I need a rest after the end of a school day so I try to come home for awhile to take a break. I go back to the volunteer house and drink some coca-cola (I've become a total addict here; I think I crave the sugar), and to prevent myself from never moving from the sofa, I try to wash clothes.

Here, as in most of Honduras, clothes are washed by hand. Every house I've seen has what's called a pila, a waist-high, rectangular concrete basin that fills with water. Imagine a lid on the basin and a large square cut into the top of it. The two remaining sides have washboards and a drain built in and that's where clothes are washed. We have bars of clothes-washing soap that we rub on to the clothes, you scrub them, and then you dip b uckets into the basin for water to rinse. For the kids, washing clothes is a daily chore, and I try to once a day as well or else it really piles up. Even when I have to skim the floaties off the top of the pila water; even when I can never ring all the soap out of my jeans; even though all my clothes are now hopelessly stretched out; even when I find bird poo on the clothes hanging on the line (okay, that one is a stretch), there's something I love about washing my own clothes. Maybe it's the feeling each day that I've accomplished something, or the peacefulness of standing at the pila after a long day, or the camaraderie I feel with the other volunteers when we wash clothes together, or the mindless productivity that allows me to think and process the day's events, or the feeling that by washing my own clothes by hand each day I'm a little closer to the daily experience lived by a vast majority of the world's population.

After taking an hour or two at home to rest and wash clothes and do some lesson planning or internet work in the office, I try to spend the rest of my afternoon with the kids. Every afternoon is different. Sometimes I've made plans in advance with a kid; someone in one of my classes who wants help with the homework I've given or needs to get caught up on a lesson; someone I promised to study English with; one kid in particular who likes to go up to the big white cross on the hill and have me tell him a story. When the kids have birthdays, the volunteers take them into the closest neighboring village, a 20-minute walk down the road, with a few friends to buy soda and snacks, so those "birthday parties" are usually afternoon activities planned in advance. A lot of other times, there's nothing planned. I'll wander out to see what's going on in the rest of the hogar and if there's someone I can play with or talk to.

A Day in the Life (Part 1)

I have to apologize again for the long delay! This time my excuse is a broken computer keyboard, and things are not easy to get fixed here. The cliché is actually super true - we really do take a ton for granted. The ability to hop in a car and drive a computer somewhere it can be fixed, maybe even be left over night with confidence, and come back to get it the next day, for example, is not something I or anyone has here.

There is so much going on here all the time, I thought it might be good to bring everyone up to speed on what a typical school day is like here, at least for me. It should help to give a little context.

The day starts at either 6 or 5:30 a.m. when I get up to go to breakfast and do whatever internet chores or class prep I have to do (since we don't have internet in our house). Breakfast varies, but during the week it invariably includes beans and the signature corn tortillas. My favorite breakfast is hole beans (verses mashed) with steamed plantains and a delicious sauce they call mantequilla, which is kind of a liquidy, cheesy, sour cream. We have it every Monday with banana licuado, hot milk with some sort of add-in, a lot of times rice or oats.

The jóvenes, or teenagers, here get up at 5:30 every morning so that they can leave for high school by 6:15ish. It's a half hour walk and school starts at 7. So breakfast is a casual affair in the comedor, with kids, teachers, madrinas and padrinos filing in at different times depending on their schedules. At a little before 7, the metal bell outside the comedor that serves as the signal for the beginning of every activity here, rings for all the elementary school kids to line up outside to walk to our school, which sits behind the big soccer field at the back end of the campus. They all wear light blue button down shirts and brown pants. Their uniforms usually look really nice during this time each day (they get taken off and washed immediately after school); after a couple hours, it's amazing how un-bonito they look.

Visiting a Different Hogar

Sorry it's been  awhile since my last post. I sprained an ankle last weekend and it's really thrown me off. I'm still hobbling around like a viejita as the kids say but getting better!

This is a post I wrote several weeks ago. It's a sort of retrospective part 2 to the post "The Prodigal," and I have to warn from the beginning that's it's pretty depressing. I want to take a few steps back and tell a little bit about what it was like to pick up the three new boys from the state-run children's home. The experience has definitely been one of the most impactful of my time here so far, and I know I'll be feeling it's repercussions for a long time. By this time, this is an old story, but it's amazing how vividly and how often my experiences there recur in my memory.

The home is part a network of state-run institutions throughout Honduras. It's meant to be an impermanent home for children who have been removed from their families or picked up from the streets until they can go to more permanent homes like Amigos. Of course, this doesn't always happen and children can end up staying in one of these institutions for much longer. One of the boys we picked up had been there for three years.

Driving up to the home was exactly like driving up to a prison. That's not an exaggeration; it's located right next door to a prison and they share the same high solid concrete wall. At first we actually drove up to the wrong door, a massive solid metal entrance that could open to let a car through. Through a small square window (the Wizard of Oz absurdly comes to mind) a guard told us that this was the prison entrance and directed us to an identical doorway a bit further down the wall. 

We drove into the compound toward a large concrete building sitting in a field of dust and pale grass. It was about three-stories high and structured around a courtyard in the center. The prison feel didn't completely go away (especially since with it's stairways to the upper levels and concrete flooring, the courtyard looked a lot like a recreation area you might see in a jail), but the inside was painted with pale greens and purples and yellows which broke up the tedium a bit and reminded me that this was a home for children. As we entered, children stared down at us from the upper levels surrounding the courtyard and called out to us. Here, the children address each other as well as adults as tío and tía so that's what we heard: a chorus of high voices shouting sharply "tía! tía!" for our attention.

A Prayer for Peace

To walk in to the Amigos de Jesús chapel yesterday between 11 and 12, it would have been difficult to believe it was full of some 25 teenaged boys and two girls, anywhere from 13 to 22 years old. You would have found the capilla in reverent silence, save for the church music serving as a background to the kids' meditations. The Amigos de Jesús family was answering Pope Francis' request for prayers for peace.

The capilla at Amigos is the second floor of the office building and it is open air. All four sides have a concrete rail and through it you can see the mountains in the distance and overlook the rest of the Amigos campus. The service began with Amy, our co-director, explaining what was happening in Syria; that it is locked in a civil war, that there is destruction everywhere, that the government used chemical weapons against its own people, that those who suffer the most are the children. She showed a short news clip with some images of the fighting in the streets. All the kids were rapt with attention.

Then two of the boys took turns reading the text of the Pope's message delivered last Sunday calling for peace (you can find the text in English here). It was a profound moment. As I listened to the words in Spanish, sitting in this open-air chapel overlooking the beauty of the Honduran countryside, I felt the force of the Church's universality in a way I never had before. Those words redounded around the world in every type of setting, in every language.

Before the time for prayer, Amy called attention to the Pope's call for peace not only in Syria, but also around the world. Honduras, though not at war, is also not at peace, she said. We must pray for the people of Syria, and for peace in our own nation, and in our own hearts.

The Prodigal

Tonight, during the hour and a half each night between dinner and prayer circle where everyone hangs out outside, I played for a long time with a little boy who is new to the hogar. He is eight years old and has a smile that spreads in a long line across his face to light up big brown eyes, a high-pitched voice and a babyish laugh. He called me over to a corner of the porch to sit on the ground so I could watch him proudly assemble a tiny plastic top. He spun it as fast as he could a few times - "Mira! Mira!" - and then handed it to me to try. He was completely content in that moment, spinning his tiny top or watching me spin it, shrieking when it got too close to the edge of the porch, giggling every time it fell over. I could hardly believe that it was only a few days ago that I had sat with the same boy while he sobbed miserably into a plate of pancakes. 

I was one of the group who went to pick him up from one of the state-run children's homes four days ago. We picked up three new children from the home that day and he had been then one I had gotten to know the least on our trip. In contrast to the other two boys, he had been calm and unimpressed during the ride back to Amigos, half-smiling at times, but mostly quietly looking out the window. I don't remember once seeing the wide smile that has come to define his face for me now.

We arrived to the hogar as everyone does here: to the applause of the entire home gathered at the front gate. All three timidly got out of the car and walked through the crowd where they were introduced to the padrinos and madrinas, the caretakers of the boys and girls who live on-site and are with the children full-time.

I didn't see the littlest boy much that evening or the next day. At dinner in the comedor I made a point to sit with him, but he gave me a cold shoulder. At breakfast and lunch the next day I looked around to find him sitting sullenly, not speaking to the other boys around him. 

Late that afternoon, we new volunteers were in the midst of an orientation session when we learned that the boy had run away. It was 4:30 and we learned he had been gone about half an hour. We came out of the session to see search parties assembling. Two of the trucks full of people went out to drive in separate directions and a large group of boys and a few padrinos went out on foot. After night had fallen, the search parties began to return one by one. Staff members assembled a description of the child with photos and dropped them off at local police stations. We had to go to sleep that night not knowing where he was.

Photos of Copán Ruinas

Here are the long awaited photos!

To the right, this was a replica of a temple found at the site and reconstructed inside the museum. They really liked red paint, apparently. We think of the stoney colors that you see in the picture above, but because of paint flecks archeologists have found, we know that most of those buildings actually would have been brightly painted, many of them in this kind of bright red. It must have been really vibrant if you lived there, and really terrifying if you were a conquered visitor! We actually got to see those beautiful parrots (macaws). They were everywhere and with the ruins as a backdrop it made you feel like you were in a movie. The skulls below lined the bottom of where the king's throne would have been. A lot of the Mayan artwork we saw involved skulls.

 

 Finally, this is the coolest thing I think we saw. This stairway protected by a tarp is basically a giant history book. Engraved on those stones from left to right are the names and deeds of the Mayan kings from one of the dynasties. The stairway was like a stoney library. A carving of the ruler in the middle of the stair marks where his section begins. Though other nearby ruins are famous for more impressively large buildings, these are most famous for these stairs and the amazing artifact they are for researchers. Here's a little more info and a better picture. This is another really good picture of it.