Life is but a dream

I wrote the first post first so you would read it first, so if you havn't, start scrolling down.

Local elections this Sunday, the big showdown between the liberals and the nationalists; every tree, traffic light and other imaginable oblong street-side object plastered with smiling portraits of, corrupt multimillionaires feeding off powerful friends and drug money, or candidate mayors if you wish. That, as well as a surge in political killings; eight high standing candidates in two weeks. Very very few of the people I have talked to honestly believe in a chance on the positive change this country so desperately needs. With the frightfully high rates of illiteracy and mal-education politics are far from what they should be. I haven’t really heard a single policy or plan, only extremely catchy tunes, calls for more security and men parading around with enthusiastic supporters brandishing a smile that would make Heath Ledger's last cinematic personality giggle in orgasmic approvement. All I know is that one of the popular candidates plans on abolishing the police force and have the national army patrol the streets.

I think I can now say I have quite comfortably integrated my self into the Honduran media; one live radio interview, an article on me the Saturday papers after the National Day of the volunteer, and I can often be spotted on Channel 6 buzzing around sending faxes or whatever else during the daily morning interviews with my boss. Now while the article isn’t exactly factually correct, it will still serve as an excellent piece to help ignite the fires of reminiscent nostalgia sure to come. It even comes with a picture =)

Six months have almost passed, and while I am slowly but steadily nearing the half, the experience ends here for the majority of participants. They had their final orientation camp last week, in which I crashed as they held it in a totally ecological nature reserve (read: old fishing village where the ‘hotel’ doesn’t even have drinkable water to provide). Instead of having only to fend off the swarms of insects and other various multi-legged critters so common in nature, we also had to keep a close eye on the bands of stray dogs that lazily entered ever open door in their sight and literally had to be kicked out. The way to the bathroom on the other hand was closely guarded by a solitary stray chicken and cockroaches the size of a minibanana, but overall nothing worse than the typical summer camp.. Although the river boat tour wasn’t exactly thrilling; the combination of monkeys, crocodiles and various bird species is quite well represented in Central American boat tours; the lax reflective day of beach laying was quite pleasurable. What did bring a slight relief to my mind was the really non-Honduras feel that hung around the various wooden peers lining the riverbed eagerly awaiting the change of light to offer any passerby a beautiful sunset moment .The last night of the short stay was marked by a loose chain of drunken lullabies courtesy of burro (donkey) the local drunk, who happily drummed away on his plastic bucket chanting in-between the embers of the 4 failing bon fires. Not really anything special or particularly interesting had not a little scorpion found its way onto one of the local’s legs. They swiftly chopped of its stinger rendering it a harmless little play toy too much of our amusement. Well mine anyways. I accepted to take it after they assured me it was dead, and I can assure you my reflexive system spiked when the bugger started to dart around my palm.

The next night was slightly more eventful; after having planned our 3-weeks backpacking around Guatemala, we randomly bumped into 3 Danes while dropping off a friend at the bus station. It started out with a few baleadas, a story about how they missed their bus, a game of pool and some sporadic tips about Central America, however ended with a crippling hangover the next morning. Once we started with the gifiti (local Garifuna homemade herbal alcohol) the beer bottles kept coming and our plastic cups never seemed to dry up. By luck of nature my bodily dehydration seemed to be kept in balance by the quite excessive bouts of rain which trapped us splashing around the house as most of the city flooded, leaving roads unusable and the project I had planned to visit inaccessible. More interesting was my bus journey back direction San Pedro; upon passing over the first big river just outside of Ceiba I could spot hundreds of woman and children lining the riverbed doing their Saturday washing the ecological way. The carcass of a smashed up pickup truck covered in shrubby vines and the small wooden shacks lining a huge golf course were excellent mind candy.

What a day.

I have been uttering those 3 words quite frequently in the last couple of weeks.

I work for Copeco now (Comisión Permanente de Contingencias); an unrealistic realization of a little monkeys dream. I was sitting on the loo one early Friday morning calmly reading Khaled Housseini’s newest novel when my electronic communication device started buzzing, ruining my established zone of tranquillity. I unwillingly picked up as I my flashing screen told me it was my program coordinator calling from her office line. She had contacted Copeco and wanted me to pass by later on in the day to check it out. Saturday mourning 6:31 I catapulted out of bed, carried out those early morning rituals all we global monkeys do and was well on my way into what would be my first day on the job. Our goal: get one of the 550 'property of the republic' labelled ration bags (capable of sustaining a family of 6 for 10 days) into every poor mothers house, along with the distribution of gas tanks donated in the aftermath of recent flooding. By the time I had completed the introductory round of the office staff, our military escort unit had assembled and, together with the 3 military trucks and 5 pickups, our convoy was complete and ready to move out. Our destination: A low lying agricultural area that went unspared by mother natures lashing rains and had filled up to the brim. Entire crop fields filled up like lakes for as far as the eye could stretch, with only the biggest of the sturdy oil palms still standing in memory of the past. The roads had been ‘cleared’ (relayed by bulldozers pushing around tons of sand) just the day before, breaking the village’s 30day virtual isolation. Virtual as in only large tractors and canoes stood any chance of wading through the blue fields.

Upon reaching our destination we set up our station in the village’s highest point – a hospital installation built by a Protestant church society and tried to figure out a logical system to process the registration of the recipients. We had received various documents noting the worst hit, and there for prioritized, citizens from the mayor along with our own reference lists. Copeco works by a strict protocol requiring every ration to be signed for by the receiver (or fingerprinted as about a forth of the disaster victims cant write their own name, or fail miserably in their attempt) and every receiver has to be ether listed by the authorities, other organisations or individually judged by Copeco members. By the time the first 100 or so had smoothly passed through the system a small problem started to arise: the remaining 450 people had all amassed behind the hospitals steal fence slowly building up the pressure towards the front. About an hour later the gate almost sprang open when the padlock gave way and 12 military guards were sent out into the crowd to try and retain order, but to no avail. The elderly, pregnant woman and children alike were being pulverized in the mash until our regional coordinator called off the mission and gave orders to pack up. The chance of someone dying in their, by now 5 hour long, exhausting wait in the blaring sun had become too realistic.

I myself made my way through the crowd carrying the ration of an old weathered woman with infant, and can honestly say the pressure matches that experienced in the front row of large festival in quivering climax. The armed soldier and I barley managed to get back onto the hospital grounds. Though not all days are as dramatic as this, they are fairly similar. Along with the food rations the distribution of the three quarter million litres of milk donated just recently fill up most of our time. Occasionally we do however go out to the airport and to pick up medical donations coming in from all over Latin America.

Once home that same day I sat reading an article about a 14 year old boy that was shot in the back while caught stealing a coconut and died on the way to the hospital while my host mother was telling me about how two men were killed in a gunfight this morning about five blocks down at a crossroad I pass every day. These little things are those that stand testimony for this countries dragged struggle. On our journey into the coffee growing mountains a few hours drive east of San Pedro, we came across a little house set about 500m off the ‘main road’; a single winding dirt track crossed by various rivers. Stunned by the amount of aid provided the lady of the house invited us into the patio for a cup of fresh coffee, and I mean fresh; no more than 200m from where the seed sprouted. Asking how many children she had, with a follow up of a clothes donation in mind, we learnt that of the three only the two youngest boys still lived here; her twelve year old daughter had already been married out of the house. And it is not only the poor. Organisation is absolutely catastrophic, transparency non existent and the general mind frame putrid. We still have shyte lying around in our warehouse that date back from ‘El Mitch’; the big hurricane that passed through Honduras ten years ago. Half rotting mattresses infested with spiders, ravaged by rats and of absolutely no use to anyone.

One of my days started at 5:15am; an ice cold shower, quick breakfast and four hours of mental salsa sitting in the back of the truck in the three piece convoy staring out into vivid movie like countryside while sipping away on my 0.473L orange juice (I guess the factory fucked up with the 0.480 boxes and decided to alter the label). I, and most of the people here, don’t always really realize in what beauty we live in. Absolutely ripped out of heaven, the small isolated community we were bound for lay tucked away in the upper mountains ever locked by a ring of clouds. The recent rains had swept away about half the village and their school. We brought up shelter-tents flown in from Japan, Korean mattresses and US-made wool blankets as well as plenty of milk and food rations to be distributed as a reward for community service. The Indian made army trucks even in 4x4 turbo whatever could barely make it up the steep hole-filled tracks capable of making even the roadrunner sweat. I myself have to admit jumping out of the cabin when our truck started slipping and skidding in a razor-sharp mud-locked turn on the edge of a steep ridge. But so did the other two passengers. One just feels safer with two feet on the ground.

Honestly I have been to so many places I lost count of all the individual things that have happened to me. Every incident of the past leaves a dent on the thin man. The sight of a 15year old girl pregnant or dragging along an infant bothers me no more. I have looked down on children that have but several months of life ahead, and could only hope something would save them, babies with bald scalps as their hair has fallen out before it could properly grow due to pure malnutrition and anaemia. Its scary how over time the mind readily accepts these things as normal and ceases to really react. Small wooden shacks empty save for a dirty old mattress is generic for the environment I now work in.

Just to help some ignorance off the Earth and sting your mind: the current Nicaraguan president sexually abused his own daughter, was denounced by his own wife but still continued to popularly win the democratic elections! Ha! (A-heu that means the majority of the Nicaraguans voted a paedophiliac rapist as president)

So yes, I am quite happy now. Even though my boss keeps me busy and working longer hours than the sun, I readily accept arriving at my office around 6am and getting home at 10.30pm as part of the sacrifice. I have never really been a feverish worker, but now understand what it means to have a job you love; the personal satisfaction and passion for the next day is motivational fuel like no other. This is the type of work I would love to make my life, if circumstances permit, and can readily see my self committing to.

I strolled into a house one day, strikingly familiar but strangely different. It was indeed my house, only the Christmas hurricane had passed by earlier that day leaving behind a totally different interior decoration. Everything was Christmas; the curtains, shower curtains, bedspreads, cups, plates, mugs, the saltshaker, the sugar pot. Even the kitchen clock had been replaced by one that hums a Christmas tune every hour, on the hour. Stockings hang on every wall, flashing lights decorate every rim and a big firm plastic Christmas tree sands in the corner of the living room. All very pretty, but I’m sure the December power bill will spike. So what happens? The 24th was a nervous last-minute shopping and kitchen-buzzing day until about 6 when everyone returned home to change and head off to church for the 2 hour long Christmas mass. Mine was 2 hours long, but I didn’t really mind. What followed were various visitors and fireworks till about 11 when our feast commenced. Humungous stuffed turkey as a main =) with loads of accompaniments and multiple cakes to sooth the sweet toot. What quite surprised me was the abundance of wine, beer, rum, vodka, and champagne generously flowing around. 25th was Exellent. A day of totally passivity lurking around the house picking at the stacks of left over’s with the same variety of alcohol still available. Maybe a parasites life wouldn’t be all that bad…