Copan - Again

Last week we traveled to Copan for some meetings with another small NGO, A Better World,  from Alberta. Carol Brouwer, the founder, is a nurse from near Red Deer. Carol and I met last October at a conference for NGO's working in Honduras. Since then Carol has, among other things, helped a community acquire two computers and get the students working on our program. We spent one delightful morning traveling to the community and meeting the students at Escuela Morazanica. Their facilitator was also there and it was nice to talk with him again.

Visiting a village - Must be something worth saying :))

Students in new T-shirts demonstrating the computers

Carol, Ramon (I hope that is right) and I with some of the students

Ardythe and Alyssa are in Honduras for a few days so we made sure to see a few new things along the way. We spent the night in Santa Rosa de Copan. It has been a centre for agriculture for over 300 years. Those numbers always amaze me. The logistics of cultivating, transporting and marketing products were simply staggering. Each piece of equipment and each item of production was carried on the backs of people or animals to the coast - Puerto Cortes. There is much to be learned from their struggles.

Sunday morning I sat in the several hundred year old cathedral for a few minutes. Two different thoughts crossed my mind. The happiest thought was to look at all the details of construction and realize that they were done without the aid of calculators and computers. Patience, patience and more patience. The recognition that our value, my value does not come from great things but, rather, small, insignificant-in-themselves details ... and patience.

The second thought came as I looked at all of the busy statues and art work. Of course, you will remind me of my very rigid iconoclastic upbringing. Well ... let me finish the thought ... and much of it is garnered from others I have met recently in print or in person. So many religious expressions seek to keep people from looking 'outside'. The same applies to different forms of government or ideology. There is often a great deal of activity or, in this case, pageantry to keep attention focused on the 'inside'. There is nothing more dangerous than having adherents discover truth or light outside of the box. Even the Mayan ruins in Copan echo the same approach. Leaders would be standing atop a tall pyramid while the followers would turn their backs on the enormous, endless vistas of verdant valleys and towering hills to listen, obey and sacrifice.

Our work here is to equip people to look outside their box, sometimes very much like a prison cell rather than a cathedral or amphitheatre.  We give them the tools to find life, knowledge, nutrition ... We want, in the end to give them hope. Rather subversive. Well ... very subversive.

In Copan, I accompanied Carol up a long road to a village up in the hills. The condition of the roads can make a village seem remote in a big hurry. We met with the village in a school which Carol's NGO had helped provide materials for. We listened to the villagers give us a glimpse of their lives and of some of their aspirations.

These people have only one source of employment at this time. It is a local ranch. For nine months a year they walk ninety minutes, work for nine hours and then return home - all for $4.00. During the dry season, there is no work. We talked at length about some of their challenges and some of their opportunities. We will see what they come up with for ideas. It is so easy to drop in and have a little bag of answers. Rather more difficult to listen, seek to offer some information and let it go.

We met Maria, a young lady from Alberta who biked down to Honduras and is now doing some health work in one or two villages. One of the villages she is working with has no latrines. In talking with the Anglican bishop Sunday, he affirmed that this was still the case in many remote villages. Such a basic starting point. This illustrates the huge disconnect that confronts me on a very regular basis. One moment I am click and dragging ... and the other I am trying to design a latrine that will work (not so hard) but will be cheap and attractive enough to make people want to build and use them (very hard). Inherent in that disconnect is the thought that because I can click and drag I must be somehow more intelligent, more caring, more developed. 

For a full set of plans and comments, email me or message me on facebook.

You can always click on the picture to enlarge it.

The start of a latrine in Santa Rita

For the North Americans - sit down style

Last night I met with two men who work for a large, multi-national company specializing in intensive livestock rearing. From my background in broilers, I was familiar with their equipment (albeit twenty years ago) enough to enjoy the conversation. Again, the disparity between a large company in Honduras trying out systems that will grow 100,000 birds in cages with automated equipment and small villages who could be given a whole new lease on life if they had access to a 5,000 bird quota (you have to be part of the Alberta poultry scene to understand that last sentence). If the production of birds was broken up to small units, problems of disease, manure build-up, imported feedstuffs ... the list is long ... problems that would become very manageable in creative and sustainable ways.

One of the men was from Germany and he was amazed at how close facilities were and was thinking that there must not be a big problem with disease. My first thought was what was in the feed to prevent outbreaks in a hot, humid setting. Since the same corporation controls the making of feed, the supply of chicks, the construction of barns, the growing of birds, the processing and the distribution of the products ... there seems to me that there might be a wee bit of opportunity for excessive amounts of antibiotics and other sorts of products getting into the system. I'll leave it at that. Well ... one more thing. The company is testing three different growing systems (all cages) here in Honduras. They will then use the findings in 18 months to set up 100 or more barns in China. You do the math (a chicken cycle is no more than 6 weeks).

An African Latrine - Pretty snazzy if you ask me.

After two months of dry weather, the clouds are beginning to form again. We had two rains last week which helped settle the dust. Time to get seedlings started to be ready for the rains.

TTYL

BB