Category: honduras

I had been promising Karina for some time that I would go to her house to watch a movie. I had lost count of the amount of times she had asked me in the last two months and the increasing amount of times she had given me her ‘I am very disappointed in you face’ when I had failed to set a date. For an eleven year old she had the guilt trip down to pat. One day she was going to make a great mother.

Karina comes from one of those very special families in the valley. One of the two we spend the most time with as a family of volunteers. Whenever there is a special occasion it is always Karina’s parents – Maria and Mario that we invite round.

Mario is a short man with an almost permanent smile on his face. He has two habits that make him dear to me; the first is that he can never remember my name and the second is that he is always asking me ridiculous questions. Every day he travels down to Ceiba to do whatever work is available. He has to work hard to support his family. Three of his own children and Christian, the two year old son of Maria’s sister. ‘A gift’ from El Salvador. When he arrives home in the evening he immediately takes his shirt off and begins helping in the kitchen. It’s the busiest part of their three room home and continually full of laughter. 

He is one of the few husbands I have met here who is openly affectionate with his wife. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not really done here. You almost never see couples holding hands in the street or kissing in public and so those rare moments of tenderness between spouses are really something special to behold. There are lots of these between Maria and Mario.

Maria is a short woman with laughing eyes and yet another permanent smile.  She is very much the boss of the house and always has everyone arranged with a few words. She’s an extremely proactive and giving woman. She has the village’s only sewing machine, where you can often find her patching pants and mending t-shirts for whoever might need it. Maria is one of those women for whom nothing ever seems to be too much trouble. You can ask her almost anything and you will be met with a big pair of dark brown eyes, a wide smile and a nod. “Vaya pues” is her catchphrase. She is currently obscenely pregnant. We seem to have been waiting forever for the baby to arrive. Every time we see each other we pat the bump and both say “todavía?”

Historically, I have a rather unfortunate habit of turning up at her house just as she is about to shower. I don’t know how I do it. This never stops her from giving me a big hug and a smile. The huge belly making the embrace somewhat awkward. Withouth fail she says “Me voy a bañar Laura.” We always giggle at the fact that this happens every time I call. Three of us squeeze to a tiny room, about as wide as Maria is pregnant. This little hut is where they have their fuego – a clay wood burning stove. It was Maria who gave me my first tortilla lesson on this fuego when we made about sixty for a party. Honduran women can make tortillas with their eyes closed. We chuckle at what horrible shapes I managed to make before finally getting it right. Karina and I quickly pat them out on our little plastic bag circles before passing them to Maria, who gives them a score out of ten before carefully placing them on the fuego to cook. It’s not long before Maria is presenting me with my own tortillas and a plate of chicken soup and rice. She smiles widely and we all sit on whatever we find in the living room and eat. I feel so welcome that its ages before I leave. When I do, Maria sends Karina to guide me up to the street, through the unlit mud track behind their house and tells me to come again soon.

El Pital

Dinner with the locals in Honduras is always a wonderful experience, albeit a humbling one. Tonio is my current landlord and next door neighbor. Despite his short comings as a builder (being three months overdue on my house and all that) he’s been nothing short of lovely to me. I forgive him for all that (and for waking me up at 5.30 every morning) because he brings me limes, tomatoes and mangos from his finca. He also makes his daughter give me tortilla lessons and sends his dog to sleep on my porch at night (to protect me apparently). Some nights we sit outside chatting and drinking pop and he asks me questions like “do the people in England know how to cook rice?” Then he makes us fried chicken, tortillas and refried beans before going to work at the local school where he spends every night sleeping on the floor as a night watchman. After dinner we all went to sit outside in a bizarre collection of chairs and hammocks chatting and trying to cure Tonio’s grandson of his fear of the hand sized moths flying all around us. The house is simple, three rooms with dirt floors; a kitchen, a bedroom – shared by the other six members of his family and a spare bedroom where the family host visiting volunteers. It’s amazing to look at what little they have and how much of it they are willing to share. The kindness of Hondurans never ceases to amaze me.

El Pital

I have been here a few months now. I find I get more and more used to how things are here and get less and less struck by how different it is to home. This probably means that I often forget to mention some of the things that happen that you might find very different. I have been thinking for some time that it might be a good idea to start writing about these things, so here we have it, a little guide on some of the differences between home and life here in the valley. I should probably set the disclaimer here that this is no way representative of Hondurans parse, but rather the Hondurans that live here in the same valley as me, who we shall refer to hereon out as ‘Cuencans.’

Reading

Apart from their school notebooks, which they are obliged to carry, you will almost never see a Cuencan reading. They would never have a book in their hand unless they were about to wedge something open or hit their dog with it (see ‘Perros’). Cuencans don’t genrallt tend to read for pleasure. They laugh a lot at us Gringos, who choose to pass the time swinging in a hammock reading a book. When it comes to reading, they have a list of other things they would much rather be doing. In fact I think they would rather be bored than read. The funny knock on effect of this is that most of my students have absolutely no concept of punctuation or spelling. If I ask them to write a story it will almost never have a comma or a full stop in it, it will just be a page long sentence. They often don’t even put spaces between the words, sosometimesitsjustapagelongword.

V’s and B’s

Over here, as in the majority of the Spanish speaking world, there is little differentiation between how you pronounce a B and a V. Consequently you end up with Bs where you need V’s and vice Versa; sometimes with hilarious results. For example on the way down a valley there is a sign originally designed to ask people to not throw rubbish out of their cars. It should read ‘No Botar Basura,’ botar being the very ‘to throw.’ What it actually reads, in lovely hand painted type, is ‘No Votar Basura’ which means don’t vote rubbish. Good advice, I guess, but I am not sure this particular sign was intended to be a political statement.

Meat

Meat is meat here, whatever it is and however it died. And they cook the lot. This is perfectly illustrated by the fact that when Jonathan’s dog caught a possum in the yard last week Doña Maria, the Honduran lady who lives with them had it bubbling in a pot before you could say “Christ that’s ugly.” Except they wouldn’t say Christ. They’re missionaries. Apparently Jonathan lifted up the lid to see what was cooking and found a little furry face staring back at him. Nice.

Frescos

I guess it’s different for different people, but in England I almost never buy Pepsi or Coca Cola. There about a million other things I would prefer to drink over this penny cleaning, gut stripping, unethical black goo. In England, I would also have so many other more healthy, cheaper and attractive options; the purified water that comes straight out my tap being one. Here of course they don’t have purified water coming out of their taps, some of them don’t even have taps. What they do have however is either Pepsi or Coca Cola. Every village will inevitably have a pulperia, which is the equivalent of a local store tacked onto the side of someone’s house. The only thing in addition to the most basic items that you are guaranteed to find at every pulperia in Honduras is Pepsi or Coke. This is because every pulperia in the country has a deal with either Pepsi or Coca Cola. Most days, round about dinner time you will see a child walk past on the way back from the pulperia with a bag of flour (for the evenings tortillas) and a 3 litre bottle of Pepsi (for the evenings refreshments). I can guarantee that the 3litre bottle of Pepsi cost more than the ingredients for their entire meal. Am I the only one that thinks that it’s totally hideous that a gross sugary branded drink is more readily available than clean safe water? To me it seems like development skipped a couple of chapters. Every day I am reminded that when I go home, I am going to slap the first person that complains about water ‘out of the tap.’ Probably with a 3 litre bottle of Coke.

Getting around

Transport is definitely different here. It’s funny how much time you can spend cursing the driver of an empty truck, who left you standing in the rain before you remember that they’re not actually obliged to pick you up. Despite the downsides and the illegality of the whole arrangement it goes on because it appears to keep the whole of this part of the north Coast of Honduras going. The biggest difference I had to overcome moving here was that the whole system requires you to adopt a much more relaxed stance to your plans. I have never been so absolutely dependent on others to get anywhere. The trick when planning anything is not just to leave two or three hours to get there, it’s also to plan that you might not arrive at all.

Pets

Dogs are not pets, I repeat dogs are not pets. Meaning that you’re not obliged to feed them, clean them or indeed be nice to them. They are simply there to bark at passers by in the night, by day they can take care of themselves. While I can’t deny that some Cuencans have emotional attachments to their dogs they certainly don’t dote on them in the same sycophantic way we do in Europe. Lot’s of people have Dogs here, in fact too many if you ask me, but to Cuencans dogs are always animals. One of the other volunteers, Simon, has a Labrador called Zoe and for the life of them no one can understand why we play with her, walk her, why she has a collar or why she does what she is told. The most incredible thing for them is why she is allowed in the house. It’s simply beyond the scope of the remit they believe a dog fulfills. To visitors it can seem completely cold, but then it’s also completely sensible. For them a dog guards the property, no more no less. The villages are full of skinny, tick ridden dogs, not a recognizable breed amongst them, who spend their days hunting around in bins for food and their nights barking at anyone walking through the village. Under no circumstances would you want to touch a Cuencan dog. They’re not dangerous, they’re just gross. They’re forever having babies, most of which get drowned. Few of them know how to play as their usual experience of being physical with a human being involves being beaten. The really terrible but quite funny thing is the trick that we all learn pretty quick. If you want to get rid of a Cuencan dog, say it’s barking at you or chasing you as they sometimes do, all you have to do is look at it then scoop down as if you were picking up a rock. They immediately scarper. They automatically assume you’re going to throw a rock at them. I am assured that this works in every country in Latin America. Practical…but really bloody sad if you think about it.

Honesty

A lot of cynical gringos who have been here far too long will tell you that Cuencans are dishonest. This simply is not true. In fact, as a culture they are often too frighteningly honest. This is best emphasized through their use of vocabulary, which can be hillariously binary. If it’s not beautiful, it’s ugly, if it’s not skinny, it’s fat. But more than that, everything is situational and it’s almost always comparative. If you are unlucky enough to be the largest person in the room, you are the fatty. To coin an English idiom, the Hondurans tend to call a spade a spade, but only if it’s stood next to a rake.

Early rise yet again; 5.30am this time. Abram was already loading the back of the buggy with plants when we got down stairs. We left as the sun came up out on the bumpy road back to the main highway, giving a lift to another Mennonite en route. As we had become used to we chatted about life and the universe and our very different realities; each with a new understanding of the others, and me with a growing respect for theirs. For breakfast Deborah had prepared home baked eggy bread, freshly squeezed chocolate milk, banana bread and mini bananas. 

After some distance we drew up next to an old mine. Keen to explore Jonathan and Abram jumped out, followed shortly by Deborah and myself. The mine was almost perfectly concealed by its high sides but as we walked up the grassy tufts the cavernous glistening white hole came into view, the bottom filled with water and a single black tyre lodged somewhere in the middle. Sat in a river a week before at Lancetilla Jonathan and I had laughed about what always ultimately happens when groups of people are faced with water and rocks….they start aiming and throwing them. Sure as, pretty soon all four of them were stood on the mine side hurling rocks down, aiming for the middle of the tyre. I stood back from the group just to watch it, it was one of the many moments of which I wished I could take a picture. Two bowl haired, bush bearded braced and booted Men, a pale little woman in a floor length dress and head cover, all so serious and stoical looking hurling rocks into a mine with a 6 foot long haired American in jeans and a t shirt. It was great.

They dropped us off on the highway and neither party seemed to want to say goodbye. We talked and talked until the bus arrived and they stayed until they had waved us off down the highway. We hardly spoke for the next 15 minutes but when we started we couldn’t stop, much like two people who had just witnessed something they knew it would take a long time to process.

Sunday to church; like I haven’t done in years. It appeared that Jonathan had contracted some terrible stomach bug and was forced back to bed. It seemed I would face a Mennonite Sunday church service alone…all three hours of it. The first half hour passed quick enough as I was still mesmerized to see a whole community of these people in one place at the same time. All the blond children, the big bearded men, the many babies and there were even two songs sung. The next two and a half were almost completely unbearable. It’s one of the only times in my life I had wished I had a baby, that or an uncontrollable bladder problem. This way I would be able to go and stand outside at regular intervals and escape the endless sermon, switching between English and Low German. I went to church half out of curiosity, half out of manners and in fairness it was an important part of the experience. Their faith is everything to them and I am not sure I could have left without attending church. However it is not an experience I will be repeating in a hurry.

After the service I was swamped with invites to visit and endless questions as to how long we would be staying. Confessing that this was our last day in Barton Creek and that Jonathan was really in no fit state to leave the house they all summated that it would be best to descend upon Deborah and Abrams house later that day. I have never felt quite so interesting in my entire life. We walked back home where I went to visit Jonathan in his new home in the basement (it was cooler there). I mixed him some rehydration powder in a flask of water and gave it to him, chuckling to myself at how he had asked “Rehydration powder?! What are you going to need that for?” before we had left. Poor thing.  I spent the majority of the early afternoon chatting with Deborah and tending to the baby who was doing the restless routine.  Abit later Jonathan surfaced and came to sit with us not minutes before Daniel and Rebecca Heinrich arrived with their two adorable children.

Daniel and Rebecca were actually German. By this I mean they had moved from Germany to Belize a few years ago and converted to the faith in moving. They currently lived in lower Barton Creek but were having a few problems with language there. They speak High German, in Lower Barton they speak Low German and almost no one speaks English. SO they were in the middle of a ‘mediation process’ to move to Upper Barton Creek where there is more English spoken. Daniel was really interesting. He had started to study agriculture in Germany but had quickly grown frustrated with the academic approach and desired to actually grow stuff, not just manage the process. They were already Christians and so attracted by the simple life and the chance to fulfill his dream of being a farmer he had moved here. We had not been chatting long when the Pastor Aaron and his family arrived and very soon we were all sat round on wooden chairs having one of those famed ‘big stuff’ conversations our trip would be remembered for. They were very keen for us to visit with them and so about an hour later we were piling into another horse drawn cart and over the creek for supper.

Aarons house was perfect. Placed higher up the creek it had incredible views of rolling fields and blue skies. I can’t remember exactly how many children they had but it was a lot and they were all extremely well mannered and almost permanently smiling. While Aaron and Jonathan sat cross legged outside on the grass I stood in the kitchen with the mother and the eldest daughters helping to prepare the meal. It would be another delicious and abundant supper with people who never raised their voices. After supper we sang, strange as it may seem and heard further opinions on why the Mennonites are so happy they don’t have televisions and radios. It reminded me of my Grandfather telling them what it was like ‘before the war’ when they would sing round a piano together; a reality that had always seemed distant and ridiculous to me until now.  As the lights faded outside we chatted long into the evening and it struck me how lovely it was to be in presence of family. We learnt how unfathomable the concept of divorce is to these people, how they make their marriages work, and their ideas about how to live, how we die and what comes next; all in low almost hushed tones that never alter at differences of opinion. It was a true conversation; each listened as one gave their view and then gently volunteered their own with no expectations of change on the others part. They seemed to look at us not as strangers from another world but as friends and most importantly as opportunities, to learn but also to share this amazing life and philosophy they have. It was almost definitely one of my favorite moments, topped off perfectly by the lamp-lit, horse-drawn journey back to Abram and Deborah’s.

As we walked down to the village we talked, although it was more like thinking out loud about what we had witnessed. The results were inconclusive. We walked down past the nursery and found ourselves outside the house of Deborah and Abram, where we were welcomed in by Deborah, a thin and pale Canadian woman with glasses who already seemed to know who we were and seemed to be expecting us.

Deborah was busy preparing food and tending her baby, who was still very small and seemingly not able to sleep unless she was being moved about and rocked backwards and forwards. Before I was aware it was happening we were suddenly engaged in the deepest of conversations about family, faith and the bible. It was a recurring theme throughout my stay with the Mennonites that we seemed to very quickly get round to talking about the ‘big stuff’ within what seemed like minutes of meeting someone.

What also became blindingly obvious almost straight away was that in meeting Deborah we were meeting an anomaly in this community. Here was a woman who had not been born a Mennonite or a Christian. She had been born to a Jewish mother and her parents had since divorced, she grew up in a very Catholic area had studied, lived with boyfriends, had jobs, traveled in Europe everything I had done really. An underlying feeling for her had always been that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. She had been inspired by ‘simple life’ as a way to live and had lived in various ‘intentional communities’ including a kibbutz at various stage of her life. However her experience of these communities were not good ones and she felt that even where there are the best of intentions peoples egos always win out and these communities are destined to fail. She had come to live with the Mennonites a few years ago, attracted by their dedication to the simple life but still not a Christian at that point. Something happened to turn all that around as she was born again into the Mennonite faith moved to a community in Tennesee and then last year married Abram and moved back to Barton Creek. Here we had a woman who didn’t need to ask how it worked in our world, she’d already lived there, and what’s more she hadn’t liked it and chosen this place instead. I had many conversations with Deborah over the next few days, many of which I would leave cherishing; she truly is an amazing woman in an amazing community.

It wasn’t long before Cornelius came bumbling in to find us and inform us that the lunch was ready. We gathered Abram and walked round the back of the house and through two small hand plowed fields to a large house bursting with children.  We had arrived at the home of Cornelius and Catharina Friesen and, yes, count them, their 10 children. Philemon, Abigail, Joel, Gideon, Lazarus, Esther, Boaz, Obed, Job and 1 week old Zadok were all sat around what seemed to be a giant table spread with food. Catharina had only just given birth to Zadok and so, as is the custom of the community, another family were making all their meals for the next month, it was quite the feast.  I was sat next to Abigail, 14 year years old or ‘the second oldest’ as she took great joys in telling me. She seemed very keen that I eat well and took turns in offering me a bit of everything that was on the table, be it thick chunky vegetable soups, homemade peanut butter and cassava flour biscuits or once again the delicious gloopy fruit stuff; all washed down with some ‘freshly squeezed’ milk I might add. It was Abigail and her mother that I would sit with for nearly 3 hours after dinner tending baby Zadok and talking about our vastly different lives while Jonathan sat with Cornelius in the other room talking about bombs and conspiracies.

I think the thing that struck me the most at that point in the proceedings was how little this society was based on fear. They were genuinely inquisitive about my life and very open to sharing details of their own but they had obviously never been fed any falsehoods about the ‘worldly’ life, at times I felt they understood it better than I did. Coming from the ‘worldly’ life I can see how increasingly we exist in a culture of fear and how this fear keeps us behaving in set patterns. These patterns are of the lives we are told we are supposed to have and they are patterns that give us something to compare our life favorably with the live of others. So far, my ideas about religious communities such as this have been mainly based on stereotypes. I guess these stereotypes would include the idea that communities such as this can only survive when fear of the other world exists. There was no such fear however and neither was there ego, they were very clear about what they were choosing to do but ultimately very happy with their choice to do it. I had heard that the Amish, when they reach a certain age get a ‘year off’ to go and encounter the world and see if being Amish is something they want to do for the rest of their lives. As far as I could ascertain no such thing existed in this community however I did wonder if they needed it, they all seemed so bloody happy to be there. The interesting thing was that for every little thing they did there was a reason that could always be explained with a quote from the bible, if there’s one thing they know it’s the bible. For a while I mused how much easier it must be to trust in something so ultimately, to have everything down to the clothes you wear, whether you cut your hair or not and what you eat decided by a book. It would seem in this case that with all of these things taken care of, all these decisions made for you, you are free to concentrate on what really matters in life which for them seemed to be family and their relationship with God.

After a few hours I was feeling completely relaxed but at the same time totally overwhelmed. Jonathan had gone out to the fields with Cornelius and his sons to witness and possibly partake in some plowing by hand. I had witnessed this a little earlier on and I have to say I didn’t fancy it much, I admired it, but I didn’t fancy it. It’s a very traditional society in that the women stay at home to cook, wash, stitch and care for children and the men go out and plough, plant, harvest and sell (however if you have ever witnessed a Mennonite father with his children you’ll see he doesn’t fall short on the caring capacity either). I would love to rant about how it all offended my feminist principles but in truth I have few of them these days and you would have to be an idiot to argue that this model did not work perfectly in this community. So, instead I said my goodbyes and stumbled home to Deborah, fully embracing my role as a woman by looking after her baby for the next few hours, something I was surprisingly good at. We ate another incredible meal with them when the men returned from the field and here was the second thing. Everything they eat there, they have grown and produced themselves. Just think about that for a minute. These are not trendy London lefties sat in their Stoke Newington flats droning on about ‘sustainable living’ and not buying air freighted products, these are people who literally take only what they need and eat only what they produce. The more I think about that the more I realize how hard it is to think about. Its just mind-blowing.  It was possibly precisely this thinking that put me to bed at no later than 9pm; this time in a real bedroom, with a double bed, windows, oh and a night pot…just in case it was all starting to feel a bit too normal.

Henry was like a Granddad character in a children’s book. He had a thin little face made perfectly round by his bowl cut white hair and his bushy white beard. He was wearing a very grubby faded green shirt that was stained with sweat in an ‘x’ shaped down his back, you could see it framing the braces perfectly. He had a pair of brown thick spectacles on and down the side of his nose a huge dirty elastoplast plaster, applied for function with no thought to aesthetics. He greeted us with a warm and wide grin and assured us straight away that we were ‘very very welcome.’ I remember warming to him instantly, he didn’t seem quite as strange and stiff as the other people we had so far encountered. Although I remember thinking that he was possibly a bit daft, in that endearing and eccentric way that only the very old can be.

On first impressions Henrys house was huge, too huge for someone so small and old. However we soon learned that the house was the home of his daughter and her family. He showed us around his home; a tiny elevated wood hut in the garden, with a bed in one corner a cupboard and writing desk piled high with papers in the other and three school tables down the centre. It seemed he not only lived in less then 3 meters squared, he also taught three local, non Mennonite boys there too (“They didn’t get into the school and I couldn’t see them go without the basics of an education.”).

His daughter and her family were away visiting family for the weekend and it was to my monumental relief that Henry informed us that this meant we could stay in the large house that night. Not before long I was stood in the garden watching Jonathan and Henry ‘do the chores,’ milking cows, feeding chickens and guinea pigs. As I was stood there I noticed a man walking with a horse up on the main road and I don’t know why but I waved to him, almost as if I was a local. He waved back, raining his had above his head in that slow unsure way you do when you are not quite sure what you’re witnessing but know a response is required. He then tied up his horse and bumbled down the field to inspect a little further. He turned out to be Henrys son, Cornelius.

He was a somewhat ‘stout’ gentleman with reddish blonde hair (standard issue bowl cut) and a particularly bushy gingery beard. He had a very pronounced overbite with a tooth missing and a few of the others almost completely black. He had a big rosy cheeks and a smile that almost never left his face. He punctuated most of his speech with great laugh which came out nervously as he finished a sentence; he seemed to laugh with the whole of his body. I can’t be sure if it was because I was reading Lord of the Rings or not but I wondered if this was not what a hobbit looked like. Before long he had invited us to his house the next day to watch him plough and have lunch with his family. We of course accepted, he was so nice I couldn’t imagine refusing.

Night had seemed to creep up on us very suddenly and after he had said our goodbyes we retreated to Henrys little hut to eat a bizarre collection of mangoes, beans, bananas and whatever else he could find to give us. In the sparse little hut there was no cooker or means of preparing anything so we ate the food out of metal bowls freshly skinned with a knife. Comparing this meal with the one we had had in Lower Barton Creek it struck me that either there was living simply and there was ‘living Henry’ or Peters family had surely been sinners.

Conversation turned quickly to faith and it quickly became clear that we would have to jump the invisible gaps between us. Henry almost had a tendency to preach which made me feel both irritated and very uncomfortable. He would frequently get lost in a story which appeared to have no end but would always serve to show us how much God loved us. Henry it seemed was one of the original people who had moved from Spanish Lookout over to Barton Creek to live a more simple life. “We had become too prosperous” he said, a statement Jonathan and I would repeat again and again in our later conversations about our experiences. How many communities do you know of that pick up and resettle because they have become ‘too prosperous?’ It was a truly amazing thing to hear.

We did learn a little more about the structure of the community, how things are decided democratically through meetings lead by democratically elected pastors. How there is a village store to provide only those things which the community cannot make for themselves, boots, shoelaces, kerosene, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, the latter three Henry feels are not completely necessary. After what seemed like hours of talking by the light of only a Kerosene lamp we discovered that although it was only 9pm we were all extremely tired. We were shown to our sleeping places in the large house; mine was on a high bed in a laundry room with pair after pair of hand stitched shirts and braced pants in every scale and size imaginable but inches about my head. All around me was the smell of warm milk I had been aware off since arriving, the smell of babies and of course the unavoidable smell that comes with living in a culture with no means of refrigeration. After Henry had left us I fell to sleep almost instantly waking early in the morning to wash my face in a metal bowl of collected rainwater and find Jonathan and Henry already awake and talking outside.

‘Breakfast’ with Henry would prove to be the only disturbing experience of the entire trip. Making a mental list in my head of all the things that might be disturbing about visiting an isolated, non technology embracing religious community, I can honestly say that ‘breakfast’ didn’t feature very high. But as we entered Henrys hut again to find the food we had eaten the night before all still laid out, but covered in flies I quickly lost my appetite. Jonathan ate it, I didn’t. After another round of prayers, a little impromptu singing and a heart rending account of Henry’s wife’s last living moments we were saying our goodbyes to Henry and making our way down into the village.  We were given instructions to call in on Deborah and Abram, we would know the house as they had a nursery out front and so off we went in the midday heat, once again not completely sure what we would find.

The taxi driver from the border to the bus seems to think we are in need of psychiatric help when we tell him that we are going to stay with the Mennonites of Barton Creek. After trying to convince us that what we really want to do is go rafting with his friends tour company he eventually mumbles something about them having no toothpaste and pushes his cell phone number on us incase we have ‘any problems.’ At this point I start to wonder what we are letting ourselves in for.

We tumble off the bus and out onto a long hot road with two options before us. To our left is the road to Spanish Lookout. There we are told that we will find technology embracing Mennonites in  nice big houses with electricity and computers and internet. To our right is a seven mile hike toward a community where they actively reject technology and ride around in horse and cart. 

About three miles down the track we hear the sound of horses from behind us and along came Jacob Dich in a cart laden with rice and buckets. He slows down and then stops and asks where we were heading. After raising his eyebrows he then proceeds to rearrange everything in his cart to accommodate us. We hop into a small wooden seat at the front of the cart with a great view of the rear ends of two very large horses. It is here that we start our Mennonite adventure.

The pace at which we trotted along in the horse drawn cart was often so slow that I wonder if it might have been quicker to walk. Every time the road changes in gradient Jacob would jump out to ease the load for the horses, leaving us in the front seat feeling a bit guilty and wondering if we should do the same. 

The conversation is stunted by Jacob’s lack of confidence in his English. He often starts to say something, stops, stares at his feet for a while, tries again and then just goes silent completely; he rather reminds me of myself the past few months. He is a tall thin man with light brown hair, a Mennonite signature bushy beard and a pair of small bluey grey eyes; a shade like unpolished metal. He wears a grey collarless shirt buttoned right to the top, a pair of navy blue trousers with braces and white and olive green flip flops. Tucked just above his head between the frame of the buggy and the roof there is a straw hat. He untucks it and places it on his head whenever he needs to jump out. When he smiles, which he does mostly out of nerves, he has a perfect set of bright white teeth. On closer inspection they appear to be dentures. This surprises me. I guess I expected them all to have bad rotting teeth. Does a visit to dentist not constitute a use of technology?  This in turn got me wondering precisely how the Mennonites define ‘technology.’ 

I am not sure when he picked us up that he realized we were coming to visit his community. When Jonathan explains -a s only an American can phrase it – that we are coming to “check out” the community as “we heard it was really cool” he replies that it is not any colder than Honduras.  

It was in this conversation with Jacob where we first heard what I came to recognize as a typical conversation starter with the Mennonites, “I don’t know if it’s true but we have heard that….” This was usually followed by two reactions from us. Surprise at precisely what they had managed to hear or precisely how little they hadn’t. 

Eventually we turn off the main road and down the side of a field onto another smaller dirt road. Jacob says that he will try to find us a place to stay. Bumping down the main road of the village I caught glimpses of barefooted blonde haired girls in floor length dresses running into their houses and returning with barefooted blond brothers in collarless shirts, braces and trousers. 

Every house we call at is the same ritual. Jacob calls, waits for somebody to come out to him. They then talk almost as if into a void, neither one looking the other in the eye, in a language only half recognizable as German. We of course understand nothing. After calling to a few houses, no one is willing to host us. Jonathan pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and asks Jacob if he knows the name scribbled on it ‘Henry P Friesen.’ Jacobs face lightens. “I know him yes, but he lives in Upper Barton Creek, this is Lower Barton Creek. Did you want to go and see him?” we reply in the positive. 

We pull into another driveway and as we sit in Jacob’s cart I watch a young boy sawing wood in a wooden building at the end of the garden. The saw is mechanized,  driven by a horse walking round in a circle pushing a bar in front of it. After a few minutes Peter approaches us and addresses us in the same peculiar way that Jacob had the others. He stands by the side of the cart and speaks without looking at us. “You are welcome to visit with us, however we ask that you dress well, by this I mean showing as little of you body as possible.” 

Jonathan and I would laugh about this later as the moment ‘I totally got busted for wearing shorts,’ I immediately volunteer to change into trousers. As soon as I do it seems the formalities are over. We sit on the porch with Peter and introduce ourselves while his numerous children buzz about us. We are shown into a house with huge table laid out with food. “This is our food” he says “we don’t know if it is what you are used to or if you will like it but feel free to take as much as you need and ask for more if you require it.” We can hardly believe what we are sitting down to. Fresh bread, butter, jam, milk, honey and corn tacos filled with meat and vegetables, all of it homemade accompanied by bananas and a huge pot of tea. This is all followed by delicious gloopy syrup with chopped canned fruits. I am not sure what strikes me most, the sheer abundance of amazing quality food, the kindness and hospitality or the abundance of amazing quality food in the absence of technology. If this is the simple life, I am sold.

We chat for some time after our meal. We are shown a pantry filled with shelves of preserved fruit and vegetable in jars and bowls of cottage cheese in the making. As we walk through the house I am struck by how a place can be sparse yet homely. Not one bit of tack or ornamentation. Everything has purpose; a sewing machine, where all the clothes were made, a blackboard where the German is taught, all simply designed, beautiful yet useful. 

We once again find ourselves sat out on the porch talking to Peter when almost to soon, a young gentleman arrives with a cart. He offers to take us to Upper Barton Creek to see Henry. I am almost sad to leave so soon. We say goodbye to each blonde, well mannered child and thank them for their hospitality. I hope this won’t be the last time I see them.

We set off in the cart with the boy whose name I don’t remember. Up over a hill and down, the same pattern repeating over green gently undulating countryside, past scenery that could almost be England. Past wooden houses and cows which no doubt produced at least part of my now digesting lunch. At times in the journey I start, as if waking up suddenly and think how preposterous it all seems; riding in a horse and cart like this as if in a time warp. As we ride, the boy asks many questions. How many brothers and sisters do we have? Are the food prices going up in Honduras too? Then, surprisingly, if it was true that we rely on microchip in our society? Had we had heard (as they had) that the governments wanted to use them to track people? I remember thinking that if I had had a mobile phone on me, whether they could pinpoint my exact location out here, in this other universe. We carried on over the hill and up a track before turning off down a long mud driveway where I could spy a little old man bending over the many plants lined up in the garden. We had arrived at Henrys house and we were about to see how this name on a crumpled piece of paper looked, felt and more importantly lived.

Ok, so I guess in Star Trek this would be a Captains Log Supplemental. Its just one of those occurrences that was so typical of my stay here that it had to be recorded.

Yesterday I went down to Ceiba with Jonathan and Wendy to do a spot of shopping and then we drove back up to Wendy’s where Elly and I had planned to do some planning in Wendy’s guest house. Beautiful cottage, big sofa, Jungle Chill, brilliant.

The weather (here we go again) had been wonderful all day but started to shower lightly mid afternoon on and off. When I say shower I mean just that, lightly rain for intervals and then stop, nothing, nada. At 4.30 I heard the final bus pass by the road and realized it was probably time to make my move. Past five in the Cuenca is this unspoken ‘danger time’ for getting a ride, the last bus had gone and soon it would think about getting dark, a process which takes all of about 20 minutes before you find yourself with nothing but the light of the moon to guide you past all the snakes.

Of course, this is Honduras so the space between deciding to leave and actually leaving was about 45 minutes by which time the rain had got a little heavier. After stopping by Wendy’s to borrow an umbrella and as I walked the rain showed no signs that it was planning o leaving me in peace anytime soon. I got about 20 minutes up the valley when I realized that the umbrella had long since ceased to function as a device to stop me getting wet and become more of a fanciful decoration.  Within two more minutes I have taken refuge on the porch of the tourist centre where I am stranded with the guy who works the night shift. A nice enough chap, related to one of my students but hardly the worlds greatest conversationalist. He pulls a chair into the doorway and motions for me to sit and in between the occasional utterance of “tan feo el clima” I am wondering why he hasn’t turned off the air con.

So there I am sat, dripping wet in what feels like a fridge. Every mode of transport that passes is a motorcycle with two or three people piled on it or worse, a bike with a Honduran teenage boy. After about 40 minutes the light has all but disappeared and I have adopted a pose akin to a meerkat, peering down the road for the faintest glimmer of a headlight. To top it all off I have food shopping which I decide not to peek at it for fear of what the soggy mess in the bottom of the drenched cotton bag might imply for my finances next week. Finally a few trucks pass and I dive out into the road, which is fast resembling a river only for them to pass me by, one stopped packed full of young men only to break it to me that they were only going about 7 more meters to Omega Tours Bar, as if I’d realistically be waiting for a jalón to go 7 meters.

SO, there I was, hanging out on the porch, frozen counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder to see if it was moving away or getting closer….like you do at school. It was miserable. As if to tease me it felt like about 50 trucks went in the opposite direction back towards La Ceiba. I would later find out that one was in fact Jonathan coming to see if I needed rescuing, but of course he didn’t see me as I was only running out to the road for the trucks going the other way. I believe that is what they calls sod’s law, although that doesn’t really translate to Spanish out here.

Eventually, I see a truck, its Earl from the School in Rio Viejo and they say I can ride with them, however they’re pretty full so I have to get in the back.  It seemed my efforts to keep dry had been for nothing as I climbed into the back with some large box covered with a tarp.  When you’ve been riding around in the back of peoples pickups for a few months you kind of get used to being squished in with things, but the big heavy tarp covered objects never cease to worry me. I had got a ride to Pital with a Coca Cola fridge a few months back and the whole time I kept my eyes glued to the ropes wondering how terrible yet at the same time ridiculously ironic it would be if I were to be killed by a Coca Cola fridge.  All that student campaigning coming back to bite me huh? Well I don’t know what was under this tarp I hid what was left of my shopping under the skirt of it and laid down at the side of it, hopelessly clutching my borrowed umbrella over my face. It was a futile effort at best (indeed, resistance is futile right?) but I think it worked a bit, well, my face wasn’t as wet and oil covered as my clothes when I finally slid out the back at Las Mangas. I don’t know how Victor managed to hold back the laughs when he answered the door to me, I must have looked like a drowned rat.

Tikal, Guatemala

Three A.M. As accustomed as I used to be to getting home at this time, getting up was strangely difficult. Either I am right and this is an ungodly hour at which you should never attempt to get up or six months of going to bed early has turned me into an old woman. At this point I really can’t be sure.

We found a convenient and cool bit of shade atop one of the many Tikal temples and took a snooze before spending a few hours climbing and perching atop all the others. I have never been to a Mayan ruin site before and I have to say it was pretty amazing. To sit on top of these huge structures that peek above jungles and think that they were built by hand is just incredible. Add that to the numerous other achievements of Mayan culture and you could be sat there for hours marvelling at it all.