TOP SEVEN QUESTIONS ASKED BEFORE GOING TO HONDURAS

1. Are you all ready to go to Guatemala? (Or Nicaragua? Or Costa Rica?)

Actually, we are going to Honduras. A little bit off the well-trod gringo trail, figuring less in small and grandiose development schemes than its better-known neighbors. I could count on one hand the number of people who remembered that we were going to Honduras; even close relatives could not get it right. Sad.

2. Are you going to get malaria?

Actually, malaria is present in places lower than 3,000 feet in Honduras, but is only widespread in a few distinct areas: the heavily touristed Bay Islands, remote parts of Olancho, and the aptly-named and little-developed Mosquito Coast. It is not present in Cofradia, but dengue is. This is only transmitted by a small minority of mosquitoes, but is severely unpleasant- a week or so of pounding headaches, biting chills, and creeping fever. And a big shot in the tookus.

3. Aren’t you sad to be leaving the United States?

Actually, this one is pretty much a no-brainer. Our nation has been taken over by savage, warmongering fascists aka the military-congressional complex; their frontman is a well-connected overgrown fratboy whose trail of failed businesses and coke and alcohol addiction has morphed into a verbally clumsy, intellectually vacant, wholly unstatesmanlike, petroleum-caked, world-alienating if you are not with us then you are with the terrorists absolute worst excuse for a president the United States has ever had. Not to mention election stealing (2004 featured widespread fraud and voter disenfranchisement also, without the help of Katherine Harris). Our nation is being devastated by climate-change-related floods, fires, mudslides, and other natural disasters that are a product of myopic greed and a relentless desire to go on living the same selfish, soul-draining, wasteful lives that most of us have become accustomed to (except the 20 percent of the population living in dire poverty, including the millions of practically invisible undocumented immigrants). Our nation has seen its social fabric ripped apart by neo-conningservatives government should exist only for tax cuts to the rich and defense spending republocratic blatantly oligarchic cruelties of the highest order. And on and on and on. The better question is-wouldn’t you be sad to be staying in the United States?

4. Is it hot down there?

Actually, it is so hot that even the mosquitoes wear bikinis and the palm trees sweat. At least I hear that they do in Cofradia. Time to prepare for a permanent suntan and drinking gallons of water every day.

5. Are there many bandits?

Actually, my guide says that bandits like to patrol remote areas of the country, such as the rural Olancho and Yoro provinces, but Honduras is not Tombstone. Most Hondurans are hardworking, decent people living lives of dire poverty with little or no economic opportunity forthcoming. There may not be enough of a visible police presence, but bandits with giant guns and ruthless sensibilities are not running amok. Law and order in the formal sense means less than the overwhelming societal urge to discourage violent responses to impoverished conditions whenever possible.

6. Do things happen on time in Honduras?

Actually, things happen in Honduras at the pace they should, which means, as a product of individual desire, rather than conforming to abstract, overarching punctuality norms that members of some societies (such as Germany) follow to the tee. There is definitely a connection between the wealthy Northern nations emphasizing strict time norms, and the poorer Southern countries like Honduras being more flexible about time. Rich nations like the United States and France, fattened by imperial legacies and on the winning side of the corporate-driven globalization crusade, can make things happen on time because they have the resources to devote to punctuality. Nations like Honduras, the perennial losers of the globalization game, lack such resources, and combined with a certain fatalism deeply embedded in the culture, means that very little happens here according to Gringo Standard Time.

7. Will you be working with the Peace Corps?

Actually, we are working with a non-government-affiliated agency, a small NGO based in New York City founded by a young woman with a big heart and a smaller pocketbook. BECA is the stuff dreams are made of precisely because it began with a single, intense dream wish by one foreigner to empower the people of Honduras to improve the education their children receive. The Peace Corps is a huge, government-funded operation that has a checkered legacy in Honduras. In the eighties, many volunteers were unwittingly used as informants for the Reaganized counterinsurgency campaign engulfing much of Central America, and at one point the Honduras Peace Corps headquarters was firebombed.