Honduras is an extremely poor country. Unfortunately, we often forget that depressing fact in our daily lives. Our students are very wealthy, our school is extremely well-funded, and the places that we visit (both in San Pedro and on vacation) often shield us from the more difficult aspects of living in a developing nation.
Of the seven nations in Central America, Honduras and Nicaragua flip-flop for poorest nation. In all of Latin America Honduras is one of the least developed. It has some of the highest unemployment, lowest wages, most crime, and least amount of infrastructure compare to its neighbors. Given the immense wealth within our narrow worlds, this is a disheartening reality.
The longer that we live here the more we come into connect with the "real" Honduras. This isn't to say that we are exposing ourselves to more danger, but certainly more disappointment as we experience the reality of the country in which we reside. It never ceases to amaze us the dichotomies that exist in this country: the donkey cart next to the Lexus on the street, the beggars outside the gigantic malls, or the shanty towns built under the advertisements for new homes in gated communities.
Take yesterday, for example. It was one of the hotter days in recent weeks. The rain has been letting up as we enter the warm parts of the year. This, of course, means a greater use of air conditioning for homes that have it. Yesterday morning we lost our power in the middle of Anah cooking breakfast and with little hope of it coming back soon our stomachs made the decision that we should seeking food elsewhere.
We walked down the street to Baleadas Express where this chain restaurant serves up a fast and delicious version of the national food of Honduras. A basic baleada is a big flour tortillas filled with refried beans, cheese, and butter. The great thing about the Express is that you can a la carte these treats with all sorts of other additives, like: avocado, chorizo, eggs, and much more.
Your basic baleada (one is a full meal) at Baleadas Express runs one about 50 cents to a dollar depending on what you get in it. For Anah and I to each have one with a drink cost us 77 Lempiras or about $3.50.
The point of the story isn't to describe how delicious these were, but was to describe what happened next. Sitting in the lobby area of Express the dirtiest little boy I have every seen walked up to us. His tattered jeans and dirt covered face made it look like he had just crawled out of some God-foresaken place minutes earlier.
He pointed to his mouth and begged for enough money to buy a baleada for him and his sister, who sat outside on the steps of the building hoping for her brother's success.
In the middle of our breakfast it was an uncomfortable situation. We had been told to ignore these requests by our school administrators for fear that it only reinforces this behavior or could put us in danger depending on who was doing the begging.
These people, and especially, the children are not the homeless people that you come across in the U.S. Of course many in the United States are victims of terrible circumstance, but many time they are undone by their own actions. Many a times in Milwaukee we have been hassled by people claiming to "ministers" whose home burned down the night before, seeking bus fare to get to the homeless shelter for the evening. This creativity surely could be used more productively.
But I digress... these children are not the result of such situations, but the victims of a never-ending cycle of national neglect and worse.
Tried as we might have we couldn't ignore the pleas of an empty stomach that for who-knows how many days had gone unfilled. He eventually wandered away for us to finish our meal, but never out of eye sight.
When we finished I gestured him to come over and handed him 50 Lempiras (about $2.50) which to him was probably a small fortune. He quickly scampered around the corner and out of the building. At first I was confused as to why he wasn't immediately going into the restaurant to buy a baleada that he seemed to so desperate to want, but Anah reminded me of a much more important task he had now.
The poor kid was probably used to getting one or two Lempiras at a time (twenty of which makes us one U.S. dollar) so to be given 50 Lempiras was a small fortune. Anah reminded me that for your average Honduran this amount of money could go along way. Fifty Lempiras would buy them the ingredients (flour, butter, beans, and cheese) to feed his family baleadas for the indefinite future.
It was just a harsh reminder of the difficult situation that this country finds itself in.
The most heart-wrenching part of the whole event was right before he took off with his new found wealth he had time to utter a heart-felt "thank you" not in the expected Spanish which he had been begging in before, but perfect English bridging the immense divide between us and giving us hope that because he may have had some schooling (or future schooling to come) to lift him out of his terrible situation.
For us 50 Lempiras is a joke amount of money. Its taxi fare to the mall or dinner out. Its a couple of beers at a restaurant. Its a jug of weekly water. But to this kid it was a lifeline.
Just another dichotomy here in Honduras.
While not exactly the same in size and scope, it was roughly the equivalent of the Pittsburgh Steelers coming to visit your local middle school. Students in the U.S. probably wouldn't bat an eye at the Major League Soccer champions coming to your school, much as the American football champions wouldn't get anyone's heart racing down here (except for maybe Jesse, who Steeler's quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is his doppelganger)
The game was a wash. To begin with Marathon lined up against the middle schoolers head-to-head. The Honduran league champions were quickly up a half dozen goals before it was decided that maybe the teams should be mixed.
