Pain and Beauty: A Story of Tear Gas Bombs and Mountain Villages

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.