In the afternoon, on August 16, 2010, our
plane successfully landed on one of the world’s most dangerous runways. Minutes later, I, along with 28 classmates,
found my luggage as I was swallowed up by the crowd, pushing me toward the
exit. A woman, who we learned was Jo
Ann, one of our professors, and her two kids showed us to an old school bus. We piled into the bus and rode through the
crowded streets of our new home: Tegucigalpa.
Our first homework assignment in
Honduras was to begin a dictionary of new words. The first entry in my dictionary was bombas lacrimógenas.
Located in the center of Central
America, between Guatemala and Nicaragua, Honduras is a beautiful country, only
slightly larger than the state of Tennessee, with a population of about 8
million people. However, Honduras is rather
unstable.
Honduras has the highest homicide rate
in the world: “86 per 100,000 members of the
population (compare that to 5 in the U.S. and less than 2 in Canada).” (Huyser
Honig) More than that, “only 1% of murders are ever solved.” (VerBeek) Furthermore, in June 2009, there was a coup
d’etat in Honduras.
With many things leading
up to it, on June 28, 2009, former Honduran President, Mel Zelaya, was arrested
in his home and forced at gunpoint to leave the country. He was exiled to Costa Rica. However, a coup d’etat affects not only the
government of a country, but the country as a whole. Curfews were set, protests were held, force
was used. And although the country was
regaining their stability a year later, people were still angry and force was
often still used.
And so, on my third day in
Honduras, I was tear-gassed. The day
began like the one before: my host mama made me coffee and breakfast and I met
up with the other four girls in my neighborhood and we walked the 45 minutes to
the university. After learning a little
about Honduras, its people, and its culture, we left to tour a local
hospital. As we left the university, we
noticed a large crowd of people with very large rocks and megaphones protesting
in the street. As our professor led the
way through the protest, we heard what we assumed were gunshots. Naturally, we froze and started to put our
hands in the air, but as we looked around, every other person was running. Confused, we tried to find the few people we
had already known in our group of 29.
Then the smoke reached us. And we
began to run. This was not ordinary
smoke. Those were not gun shots. They, we later learned, were bombas lacrimógenas, tear gas
bombs. We ran until we were out of the
gas, but only two thirds of our group was there. The gas caught up to us, so we began to run
again. We ran, faces burning, lungs on
fire, tears on our faces. We shared
inhalers to try to breathe again. We got
ahold of a classmate who wasn’t with us; the rest of the the group was together
and they were fine. A kind Honduran
woman heard us outside her home and brought us a bowl of water and a cloth to
wipe the gas residue off our faces. This
was when we learned that water helps on the skin, but burns the eyes. We thanked her and continued, this time,
walking. We made it to the
hospital—tired, overwhelmed, panicked, scared.
Well, I was tired, overwhelmed, panicked, and scared. I remember hearing someone else say that he
had always wondered what tear gas felt like. We never did take a tour of that hospital. We called our host families and my host
sisters came to the hospital to show us the way back to Jacaleapa, our
neighborhood.
We chatted for a while, my
host family and I. We ate dinner late,
as was customary. And we went to
bed. What had terrified me did not seem
extraordinary to my Honduran family. And
so my eyes were opened to the fear, the chaos, the brutality, and to the
kindness, the hospitality, the graciousness of Honduras. I began to see that the chaos and the beauty
went hand in hand.
A few days later, we
visited Nueva Suyapa, a small village in the mountains, just outside
Tegucigalpa. You can imagine it being
like a suburb of Tegucigalpa, because that is how close together they are, but
it is not a suburb. It is a village. People in Nueva Suyapa are generally
poor. Homes are not fancy, or even very
nice, for the most part. I stayed with
one family for a weekend. Their home had
one room, divided in half by a sheet.
Eleven people lived in this home.
The bathroom was an outhouse.
They had very little running water because water only flows to Nueva
Suyapa every two weeks. When it does,
they store it in large tubs, but if they can’t afford to buy a tub, they use
whatever they can to catch the water, typically two-liter bottles. The water that runs to homes in all of
Honduras is not safe to drink.
Jo Ann, the woman who met
us at the airport, lives in Nueva Suyapa with her family. She and her husband Kurt were two of our
professors. They are from the US, but
have lived in Honduras for over 20 years.
How could they live here for so long?
How could they live in a place with so much violence? How could they live in this place where
everywhere they looked, they saw poverty and injustice and hunger and
pain. Through their examples, Kurt and
Jo Ann helped me see the beauty amidst the brokenness, injustice, poverty, and
pain.
During my time in Nueva
Suyapa, I walked through the village with the family I was staying with. Dirt roads that were mostly pot holes,
barefoot kids playing soccer on one street, chickens wandering along on another
street, poverty. Nueva Suyapa is one of
the poorest and one of the most dangerous areas in Tegucigalpa and this village
often witnesses violence. But it was
here that I could finally breathe freely; it was in Nueva Suyapa that I knew: THIS is why I came to Honduras.
I’m not sure why I felt
that way. I’m not sure what the reason I
came to Honduras was. It was in Nueva
Suyapa that I saw some of the worst living conditions, I met a man who had
illegally come to the United States in order to keep his family alive, and it
was here that I felt most vulnerable.
But although the people I met lived in deep poverty, they were
unbelievably generous and hospitable.
Although people I met had next to nothing, they could live in joy. Although it was dangerous, I knew that any
number of people would protect me.
When I lived in
Tegucigalpa, I looked at the mountains, green and beautiful, and I thought of a
little village, full of poverty and injustice and violence, settled on one of
those mountains. And when I looked at
the mountains, I understood one of the deep mysteries of life. I understood that we look for beauty and we
try to get rid of the pain, but that’s not how it is. The mountains remind me that pain is a part
of life and it is only when we learn to see the beauty alongside the pain that
we fully live.
