**Uggh. I can’t upload pictures to my Flickr account at this internet cafe. Check back in a few days for pics.**
Sunday 12/30/07 Nacaome, Honduras
With a cold bottle of soda in my hand, my back against the crumbling wall of a small bodega, and my feet propped up on the bench I was sitting on, I watched life push, pull, drag, sell, buy, chat, clang, and ring itself silly in the dozens of humans and animals that passed by me under the glare of the unforgiving afternoon sun.
Everyone had a place to go.
Every foot step sent a small puff of dust billowing up from the street.
Skittish stray dogs poked at piles of trash in the gutters with their paws as if land mines might be buried under the detritus. Drink vendors dripped sweat as they resisted the urge to consume every last chilly drop of the beverages they pushed around. Women swatted away the same dozens of flies over and over again in a futile attempt to keep them from landing on the meat and fish for sale.
We all were dirty and sweaty and hence liberated from any usual obligation people might have to look presentable. The nearly deserted make-up and perfume stalls just took up valuable space in the market and looked like absurd commercial cubicles that were dropped to Earth from distant, cooler, less dusty planets.
I finished the last of my soda and slipped into a blurry, slow buzz of caffeinecomatosefructosefantasy. I stared at the open door of the shop across the street and found coolness in the blacks and browns of the shadows inside. I let my eyes relax.
A voice from the next table over fired a question at me that forced me to come back down to the present, to the drips of sweat tangled up in my beard, to the dogs and their fleas that never get scratched away, to the kids selling pencils, batteries, and fake designer belts in the street.
“So is your bike heavy or what?”
I turned toward the voice. A man with light green eyes and too much jewelry was staring at me waiting for an answer.
“Yeah, man. It’s heavy, but it’s not too bad. It’s made of aluminum. Your English is good.”
“Thanks.” Pause. “The bike looks really nice. It looks nicer than the bikes you see around here. Where are you from?”
“New Jersey in the U.S. And you?” I asked.
“Miami. I live there. My family is from Honduras so I come down here for a month every year.”
“What do you do up in Miami?”
“I’m a chef at an Italian restaurant.” Pause. Smile. “See, now you can appreciate that, right? When I say ‘chef’ you think of some guy all in white with a tall hat in some fancy kitchen, right?”
“Uh, yeah.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.
“Down here, when I tell people what I do, they call me Lady Man or something like that in Spanish. You see all the chefs and cooks down here are women. Men never cook. Some of the older people in my family are kind of embarrassed by what I do in Miami.”
“Huh. I guess you’re right, I never really see men cooking down here.”
“Cause it’s not acceptable. Even though Honduras is modernizing, the thinking here is still very old.”
I talked with the man, Danny, for about an hour. He liked the idea of my bicycle trip and kept telling me that the trip was ‘structured real good’ anytime he learned of some new logistical detail.
“I try to ride between 50 and 70 miles a day.”
“Yeah, see, you know how far you want to go each day. You have it structured real good like that. That’s important.”
When Danny told me the Italian restaurant he worked for was part of a chain that is popular in the southern United States, I thought back to my own experiences working for rigid, quota-driven supervisors in two different chain restaurants in New Jersey and asked him if he had trouble taking off a month for vacation each year.
“Oh no. I never have problems. Fourteen years now I’ve been at this restaurant and I’ve never had problems with coming down to Honduras. I work hard all year so that I can have this time. My boss don’t ever touch this month. He knows it’s sacred. It’s time I spend with my family so it’s real sacred to me. Real sacred. I only get two paid weeks of vacation so the other two weeks are non-paid, but trust me, it’s worth it.” He was both serious and honest and acted as if my question, just by it being asked, in someway challenged the idea of his annual trip. The love he had for his family and for Honduras inspired me.
Before I rode away, Danny gave me directions to a nearby comedor that everyone said had the best fish in town.
“Tell the owner you know Danny and Marisol—that’s my mom—and I’m sure you’ll get a better piece of fish. She’ll take care of you over there if you mention us.”
I thanked him for the advice and promised to stop by his restaurant if and when I ever find myself in Miami.
As I rode away, I couldn’t help but think about the many people I have met on my trip who have connections to the U.S. Whether it be a son, friend, mother, or distant relative, it seems as if almost everyone I talk to knows someone working in the U.S. Few people know people like Danny though, people who are fluent in both English and Spanish and possess U.S. citizenship. Most of the people I have met know friends or family who barely survived the treacherous desert crossing in Arizona, a friend who tried to learn English to get better paying jobs in the U.S. but can’t seem to get his tongue to remember the strange new words, a mother who hasn’t seen her son in 15 years, a husband with a new wife in the U.S. and a forgotten one in Central America, a friend deported for committing a misdemeanor.
The positive correlation between poverty and migration flaps in the dusty curtains blowing out through windows of abandoned shacks in the arid countryside, bulges in the bellies of hungry children waiting on their father’s remittance that got held up in the mail, and shines in the weary eyes of the scared teenagers crammed in vans and trucks bound for richer places.
No wall or law will ever stop the migration of needy people seeking jobs because holding them back is simply not an option. Desperation knows nothing of walls, borders, or laws. Instead of dealing with the result of desperation, the mass exodus that is ripping families apart all over the world, governments must look at its source. Only after we (by ‘we’ I mean people here, not solely people from the U.S.) start investing in the countries from which people are migrating will we start seeing a slowing of migration. Without jobs, infrastructure, hope, and health, people will clamor over, under, and through walls of the thickest stone to provide for their families.
Danny was lucky. He happened to be born in America. He has a few pieces of important paper. Billions of other people, however, aren’t as fortunate. They can’t lure a living up from the ground beneath their feet because they don’t possess the necessary tools of health, education, and opportunity.
Posted in Bike trip: Honduras
