Month: August 2008

Mario had taken Maria down to La Ceiba on his motorbike on Thursday. The doctor told him to go to work. To miss a days pay would be unthinkable right now. He went to work that morning smiling and excited. Maria gave birth to a baby boy later that morning and all seemed well but as her blood pressure dropped and her face got greyer it started to become clear that she was sick. She told Sylvia, a friend and midwife, that she felt like she was going to die and she was worried for her children. Three times that day she saturated the bed sheets with blood and not one of the three doctors who came to see her would make the call. She needed an operation, but she was poor. She needed blood, but she was O-. It doesn’t do at this point to criticize the largely insufficient health system they have here in Honduras but everything they did came far too late. By the time the head doctor arrived to make the call to take her into surgery Maria had lost too much blood for the operation to be a success. She had torn her uterus during the birth and they had not stitched her up well enough. She bled to death. Mario arrived a little later from work, reportedly smiling and excited about his first child in 9 years. It was Sylvia who had to tell him that his much loved wife and mother of his children was dead.

We made our way down the somber street to their house and arrived just as Karina had been told. We passed an excruciating hour holding a crying Karina and listening to Mario, whose shock was stopping him from forming coherent sentences. As is the custom she would be buried within 24 hours. Within an hour the village school bus started on its decent down the hill, taking what felt like everyone in the village to pay their respects. We hitchhiked straight down to the Catholic Cathedral the next day. It looked disproportionately grandiose next to Maria’s plain wooden coffin and the congregation of poor villagers in jeans and t shirts.

Maria’s family had driven through the night from El Salvador to get here and were gazing disbelieving at the wooden box that contained their daughter, sister, cousin. A woman they hadn’t seen in years for the miles and borders that separated them.

The service was short and perfunctory and provided absolutely no comfort to anybody. They carried her out and into the back of an SUV and we all piled into the back of pick up trucks, standing all the way to the cemetery.  We all crowded round the unsightly hole in the ground, standing on the freshly dug graves of others. When they opened up the coffin and her family fell over her, crying and screaming. It was the worst thing I have ever witnessed.

Every culture deals with death in a different way. But this was awful. Seeing Maria, grey bloated and dead was terrible. This was not how I would remember her I told myself. I tired hard to hide my disapproval as people took photos of her with their mobile phones, wondering if this was more a result of shock than some strange unfamiliar custom. We held each other tight and watched until the last the earth was plied on by sweating relatives with shovels. Then we watched as Mario went to find two wooden slats, a hammer and a nail. There in the dirt he made an ugly wooden headstone for his wife, our friend, Maria.

I awake refreshed, gazing at the delicate spider webs clinging to the corrugated tin roof just inches from my nose for a long time before my brain made movement possible. I inched up and swung my legs over the side of the world highest bunk bed, taking in a deep breath and composing myself for the clumsy descent. I placed my foot on one of the horizontal wooden beams of our wooden hut and steadied myself with my hand before lowering my left foot down to the chair below. My toes searched amongst the books and headlamps for a safe place to stand and silently I prayed that the chair would not play it’s usual trick and wobble beneath me. The drop down always feels a little too far to be safe, my arm fully stretched as I finally touch down on the shiny concrete floor. Firmly on the ground I check the lower bed for Elly. However , today I found myself alone in the hut.

 Before me is our cardboard wall where I find my wooden carved Guaruma leaf with three new holes. The silent army of termites surround us. Omnipresent, they work undiscovered, committing drive by munchings of our belongings. A wooden puzzle of America, the majority of its states nibbled into dust. The beams that support the walls of our wooden home ridden with the tell tale holes. The appetite of these mini-beasts is incessant. At this moment it’s more on an amusement to think of eviction by nature. An army of termites like a vengeful landlord taking your skipped rent one brick at a time.

Outside I can already hear the taps running; the days activities have begun in spite of me. I have slept through the lighting of the fuego and the making of the days first tortillas. I have missed the neighbour collecting his bike from our porch and his descent to the city to work. I was not awake when the children unhooked their crisp white school shirts from the line, hanging next to the flat grey stone where their mother scrubbed them yesterday afternoon. I was still dreaming when the noisy yellow school bus arrived, pouring hoards of children – an army in navy and white into the doors of the local school.  The checked shirt workmen have already passed through, with machetes clipped to their belts and axes slung over their shoulders. They are already far up the trails that snake the steep hillsides on their way to the farms. The only sound they have left me is the pouring of water from the pipe just beyond our hut. When the bucket is full my neighbor will step down into the ditch that divides our houses and begin her daily task of scrubbing the family’s clothes on the rock, chatting with other neighbors while she goes. It will take her the best part of the morning to scrub the whole load clean, pinning it on the line above her head as she goes. Each sodden garment slapped on the rock the ritual four times. For now, neither the scrubbing nor the song of idle chatter has started. It must be about seven o clock; my watch replaced by the predictable local routine.

I settle into the hammock to contemplate my day. I know I have about three hours grace before my teaching day begins. Three hours before our porch is swamped with children asking for footballs, for cameras, or children selling small stone-bruised mangoes in bags, recently knocked down from local tress. Three hours, I think before I will break my silence to speak Spanish for the rest of the day to noisy, excited and eager students. I muse over the more attractive prospects; going for a swim in the river, going for a walk up the mountain trail, swinging here and reading a book. Then some of the less attractive ones; hitch hiking to the next village to wash my clothes or all the way to the city to pick up a letter. ‘It’s early’ I think ‘no rush’ and I push off the fence sending me rocking gently from side to side in the hammock, listening to the sounds of chattering birds and the ever present noise of the river.

 I think that it has been a restful awakening today as I catch sight of the plastic tub of small rocks on the porch. Half a coke bottle of small sharp rocks, just the right size. A tell tale sign of my daily activity; chasing away the neighbours pig from the dirt ditch that encircles our house. Reminded by this thought I glance quickly across to the clumsy fences of the vegetable garden, my eyes scanning for the signs of destruction and future arguments with the neighbours. Tie up your pig. Nothing. Perhaps we will survive the day without having to listen to some hopeless explanation of ‘personal space’ to our indifferent neighbour, who is thinking only of the pork chops he will enjoy when Christmas comes.

With a gentle push the top half of the kitchen door swings open. I reach round and move the clumsily nailed piece of dowel downward, giving me access to the kitchen. There are no corpses in the traps, a good sign. Or perhaps a bad one? I check the vegetables for nibble marks. I put a pan of water on to boil and unpack the coffee from the plastic boxes checking for signs of our second enemy invaders, the ants. I fix myself a feast of granola and powdered milk, remembering to mix it with the purified water this time. I drain my coffee through the ‘sock’ a crude fabric cone on what looks like a coat hanger, the preferred method of coffee preparation round this way. All around me is the smell of coffee, and for a fleeting moment I am standing in Bond Street tube station, in a rush, as always trying to muster some enthusiasm for another endless day at work in central London. At that moment a gecko loses its grip on the ceiling and meets the concrete floor with a loud slap. It quickly scurries away under the wall to recover from its embarrassment. Suddenly I am back in my wooden hut in the mountains of rural Honduras. Just another volunteer getting ready for the surprises and joys the day might bring.