El Chilar

On Friday past we were able to go up to a small village above Copan and give certificates to several students who finished a grade. It was cold (18' C or so) so all were bundled up. I was so happy that the car we rode up in had a heater.

At the gathering, I was able to show the students how to prepare a banana flower and the stem of the plant. It is painfully obvious that malnutrition stalks the children of this area with a vengeance. Any plants that can augment their diet are desperately needed. We also left some Lablab seeds (a type of bean that provides a great deal of green manure, edible leaves and seeds).

Manuel and I checking the boundaries for our next housing project - not seen ... the tiny insects that left our ankles itching for the next 6 days.

El Chilar graduates in the local primary school

Carol, an Albertan, who is providing the computers for these students.

The banana evangelist showing the edible core of the banana stem. The white debris below is, likely, also edible. It is certainly a good feedstock for animals.

As we drove up the hills to El Chilar we passed two trucks offloading groups of people. They were families with young, primary school children among them. They were returning from the higher hills where they had all been picking coffee for a week. I have no idea where and how they slept, what they ate (and if?) and what the sanitation facilities were like. It was a sobering reminder of the cost of a cup of coffee in social terms.

Accounting update:  It seems as if all the staff are keeping track of their money now. A couple showed me their books from a week of recording. Amazing. Edel, who supports a mother and two sisters, bought a small notebook for each of them and, last Tuesday, told me that the next day was the day of reviewing their week's worth of records. I have yet to find out how the "judgement" day went.

Everyone is amazed to see how the money is spent. A friend of Edel's noticed his notebook and asked why bother. They talked and Edel asked the friend what he had for lunch each day. The friend said he had a coke each day. The upshot of the conversation was that Edel did the math with his phone calculator and showed his friend how he was spending over 10,000 lempiras ($500.00 and about 1.75 month's salary) a year on soda. He also has to buy medicine to deal with the stomach problems caused by the coke. Both of them were totally shocked.

Last weekend we drove along the coast of Honduras. Enormous swathes of the coastal plains are being planted to oil palm. Millions of plants are being grown in nurseries and then being planted out. It was deeply troubling to see this monoculture robbing the area of diversity and potential. Oil palms provide income for large landowners but very little employment per unit of area. As well, there is no biodiversity and nothing of nutritional value for local people to benefit from. For the landowner, oil palms are a great option. They don't really have to protect the harvest ... hand production of oil hasn't really hit the scene here. They don't have to pay large labour costs and the trees last for many years.

For the peasants, after four or five years the canopy closes over and there is no space to plant maize, beans, edible plants and fodder. Large acreages of land which would, at the least, have provided small pockets of places to grow food are now taken out of the picture. The palms allow no ground cover so the soil is bare and open to erosion.

Of course, the processing of the oil is controlled by a handful (or fewer) of plant operators. They control the price, the transport, the production and the sale. Wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

That is enough for today.

TTYL

BB