Month: October 2008

The rain is devastating. The locals have heard that it rains a lot in England and so they grin widely and say ´just like home huh?´ I force a smile and nod my head.  No, I think to myself, this is nothing like home. I have never seen rain like this. It just comes out of nowhere and it keeps on coming. It seems to come vertical too and with purpose. When you’re out in it feels like its forcing its way through your clothes. Our ponchos and Macs seem like token measures. Waiting at the bridge we see locals passing in the back of trucks crouched in black bin liners.

The children love it. Adopting that fantastic childlike attitude that time seems to beat out of us. They are cycling around in near see through clothes. You can only get so wet right?

Right now they are telling us it could rain all week, by which time I fear the river may have inundated everything. Elsewhere in Honduras the main hydroelectric damn is in danger of breaking if they don’t shut it down and begin evacuating the water. Of course in doing this they are risking flooding hundreds of homes in surrounding towns and villages but this is mere collateral damage when compared to what could happen if the damn breaks. Incredibly an EDAN evaluation claims that 42,234 people have been evacuated, 38,604 people relocated, 8,466 home have been flooded with 1,459 damaged, and 467 have been destroyed.

It’s easy to forget that this is a country still recovering from Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It’s very hard to believe but it is said that ten years later there are still 10,000 Hondurans homeless or living in temporary accommodation. I should probably say it’s hard for us to believe. I am sure if England was inundated the promised aid would come flooding in…no pun intended. Honduras is said to still be waiting for the financial aid it was promised to help implement preventive measures after Mitch. Nature has not been kind to Hondurans. Although it would appear the world has been even less so.

For now I am camped out in our project house awaiting news and listening to stories of devastation in rainy seasons past. Down in La Ceiba it’s more of a concrete jungle. The entrances and exits to the estate are already knee deep in water and the streets are like rivers. At least they are warm and dry and with power.

It’s easy for me to think of this as just another experience to add to my catalogue of new ones this year, for all that it is scary its also very exciting. However, I can always leave. The Hondurans live with this reality year in year out, one disaster to the next, one unfulfilled promise to the next, constantly putting out fires, never having a chance to fully recover. I wonder sometimes if this is why they are so relaxed about everything. At the mercy of nature I guess we are all powerless. But when you live in a country like this it must be easy to feel hopeless too.

Is yet to be confirmed but I think it will be very high. In fact, its already ten feet high and rising. What am I talking about? Well just over a week ago, we took the kids down to Las Mangas on an activity day and it was down there in Las Mangas where some sticky fingered cretin relieved me of a backpack containing my camera, the Guaruma laptop, some bed sheets about to be washed and perhaps the most horrific…my passport. A week down the line, one bollocking, countless guilt trips, an incidence on nervous vomiting, my first police testament in Spanish and about a million phone calls later and I am here still a passport (and lets not forget the all important visa) down. The moral of this story? If you think life is going too smoothly, it probably is.

I hope to God that you have never been misfortunate enough to have been relieved of your passport whilst in another country. For those of you that have, my heart goes out to you. For those of you that haven’t let me explain my experience so far of what they call ‘one of those nightmare situations.’

Embassies

I am not sure I really understand the concept of Embassies or consulates or High Commissions or whatever they are called. My idea of them was that they are who you contact if you get into a spot of bother while you’re abroad and they help you. I also had the strange notion that if your passport gets nicked and you find yourself living in a foreign country with basically no identity, visa or means of getting home the you could go and have a word with the nice man at the embassy and he’s probably make you a nice cup of tea with one hand and a nice new passport with the other. I was clearly deluded. Well maybe I wasn’t, maybe this happens in other countries, it’s just that I seem to be living one of the countries where the embassy/consulate/whatever can’t actually issue passports. Apparently the (once) Great Britain can’t do anything in Honduras without asking some nice man in Guatemala first. What’s more, said nice man doesn’t arrive in Guatemala for another few weeks. A slight comfort is that apparently the British embassy/consulate/photocopying service in Honduras can issue me with some sort of document that will guarantee me a safe passage from Honduras directly to the U.K should ‘issuing a passport prove a problem.’ That’s nice isn’t it?

Visas

I don’t know who thought of visas; whoever they were they must have been drunk. For all I can decipher they are arbitrary bits of paper that allow you a certain amount of days (lets call it 90) in a country before someone has the right to start charging you extortionate amounts of money, interrogating you in pokey little rooms at borders or inspecting your body cavities without your permission.
A visa can take many forms. It can be an actual printed document stuck into your passport, it can be a scruffy yellow note stapled into your passport or it can be some indecipherable stamp smudged into your passport by some insufferable and humorless border guard. The recurring theme I am sure you have spotted here is that they are nearly always inside your actual passport.

Passports

When you’re spending a long amount of time in any country, let’s say for example volunteering in Honduras for a year you need a visa. It’s essential. When the country refuses (as they usually do with no reason and no warning) to grant you a years residency then obtaining a visa becomes a ridiculous charade of border crossings or waiting in endless unmarked queues in immigrations offices and hoping that the monkey with the stamp behind the triple reinforced glass wall (seriously…why?) is not having a bad day. Sometimes you can turn your border crossing into an adventure (see holiday blog); most times it is a bit of a chore (see exactly the same holiday blog).
I had a visa, in fact I have had an up to date visa since I arrived here in January, they were stamped in my passport and everything. Unfortunately now my passport is gone I have absolutely no way of proving that I had my visa renewed every three months. In fact I have no way of proving that I didn’t in fact fly into Honduras and immediately disappear into a puff of smoke for a year. At best someone will take pity on me and issue me with some sort of stamp in exchange for some sort of ‘administration cost.’ At worst I arrive at the airport in December to fly home and get charged for being 251 days over my entry visa, this is of course if I can find my flight ticket from January. If not I could be the first British woman arrested for magically entering Honduras disappearing into a puff of smoke for a year. Anything is possible in the age of Anti-Terror laws.

‘A replacement passport could take anywhere up to four weeks’ the British Home Office Identity and Passport Service website cheerfully informs me. This wasn’t even slightly annoying until I found out that my German friend got a replacement passport issued within three days when she got robbed in Bolivia. Damn German efficiency, maybe I should look up the address of the German embassy and try applying for asylum from general incompetence, at least I would get my documents in time for the New Year.

The very same website also informs me is that to obtain a replacement passport I may have to part with no less than £97. Can I just enforce here that I was robbed, I didn’t give it to a passer by whilst drunk? Now I don’t now about you but for all that you can’t live without them I think they’re overpricing them a bit. What’s worse is that everyone I meet mocks my passport. Not for the picture inside but for how over the top it is. For the start it’s the thickness of a small novel, seemingly just to rub it in for those of us who normally don’t have the cash to leave Europe how few stamps we have. Secondly they’re burgundy, a colour I always associate with unwanted Christmas cardigans, faded colonialism and old men who smell of mothballs. Thirdly the typography is hideous and finally, what is that horrible huge gold leaf crest on the front all about? No other passport I have seen (and I have seen a few this year) has anything quite that huge or garish on its cover. You might as well just write ‘Hello I am from the once-Great Britain, you may have heard of us, we once had an empire. We’re dead old fashioned you know, we’ve got a queen and everything’ on the front of it and have done with it. £97 for what is essentially a small, ugly stamp collectors scrap book with some horrifically illegible Victorian script font in it?! Have you ever seen a Swiss passport? (see above) Now they’re cool. I might add Switzerland to the list of embassies to call in at when I am still living in Honduras in March because the gold crest franking machine in London broke down and they couldn’t print me a horrible passport. Maybe I could seek Design asylum or something. Just a thought.