The old ways

Tede's comment on my last post made me sink back into a well of memories and want to write about Honduras.


Living in Honduras is like stepping back in time 150 years. It is almost like being in some sort of new kind of reality. An odd mix between ancient and modern. At least in the places I spent my time.

The majority of the people have outhouses. Real outhouses that were outside--if they were lucky with a porcelain toilet. And yet, most people also had small rickety TVs inside, wired to who knows where. Go figure.

There are cowboys--young boys and old men riding donkeys and horses, herding the cows in and out of town. Wearing cowboy hats and flip flops, ragged t-shirts and cut-off jeans, some riding saddles, others without.

All over the pueblo you can smell the wood burning stoves--made from adobe with a metal trash-can-like disk being the stove above the fire. Cooking corn (for making tortillas) or the tortillas themselves, bottomless pots of small red beans, and rice. All the while little kids run barefoot in the dirt roads outside eating bags of potato chips and drinking bottles of coke a cola.

Hand drawn community wells are in some places, infrequent bouts of outdoor running water in other places. The pila (outdoor water basin) being the hub of the woman's life--a place to wash the food, clothes, children, and home--all with bucket-fulls of ice cold water.

Small uniformed children walk to and from school in crisply ironed white shirts and knee highs. While little siblings watch from the windows of adobe or cement brick homes. I marvel at how clean the women could get those white shirts when washed by hand at the pila.

Narrow two lane roads meander through curving mountain passes, trafficked with old American school buses crammed full people standing and sitting, holding their wares and hastily reaching out of windows during stops to buy from the food venders calling prices below them while pushing home-fried foods at them on long sticks.

Poorly paved highway roads dead end on Main Streets to trails of dust and dirt. Most small towns have only one paved road--for the buses. Donkeys outnumber cars in some areas, mingled with roaming pigs, chickens, and horses. In the summer, the dust of the roads settles on everything in sight--leaves, trees, and children's faces. Women systematically water, rub, and pat down their packed dirt floors to give the appearance of cement and decrease the loose flying dirt that inevitably eddies up in their small one or two room houses.

Self constructed stick-and-wire fences gate the adobe houses, fencing in the mango and papaya trees, pila, outhouse, and stray animals. Although most gates lay slack as children run eagerly to the nearest pulperia (corner store--out of a neighbor's front window) to spend their cents on candy, chips, and whatever is needed for the next meal by mama. Animals also come and go with ease. There is a definite air of freedom, openness, and community among close neighbors. By early afternoon the women have done their daily chores and cluster around soap operas; by late afternoons, the menfolk--home from their labors in the fields--lean against the door jams or crouch in the dirt and drink coffee, calling hallo to passerbys. By sundown, dim electric lights begin to flicker on, and then soon flicker off as families crowd into their rickety family beds, small children snuggle in hammocks hanging from the ceiling and all drift off. It is quiet as the stars hang low and bright in the sky.

Honduras is a mix of the yesterday and the today. It is it's own world and lifestyle, just as, I presume, most places are. Sometimes, I ache for the quiet simplicity of that life. But I know, that for all it's calmness, it is a hard life. It is a life, more often than not, of simple survival.  I used to muse that I would someday buy a small plot of land in some small obscure place in Honduras--somewhere in the mountains--and I would live in a house made with my own hands. I would spend my mornings making tortillas while watching the sun rise and the afternoons tending a garden or embroidering or washing clothes. By night I would write poetry and watch the stars glitter. And I would have many children--just as the Honduras women do--and call to them at twilight from the soft yellow light of my small home to come in and wash up.