Don’t ask, “Can I?” ask, “I can!”

Dog update: you think these updates are going away and that maybe I’m paranoid and overselling the dangers of man’s best friend down here in Honduras. You are mistaken. My sitemate, Gen, took a trip last week to other parts of the country to attend some classes and get some training, etc. She was supposed to come back Sunday, mid-day, but I did not hear from her and as I walked by the house she’s renting on Monday morning I noticed that she had not yet returned. Skip ahead to Monday afternoon and a text message I received from Gen: “I am coming home today, got bit by a dog in La Esperanza and had to stay a little longer to get rabies shots—argh”. You see? Don’t ever doubt the validity of my warnings…they are dire and they are real.

But returning to Gen’s trip as a segue to a completely different subject, along the way she made a stop in the capital. While in the capital she visited the main PC Office and, as any true-of-heart Peace Corps type would, decided to pick up my mail for me. I won’t disclose here just how much mail I received, nor who it came from—if you, yes, you reading this blog right now, have not sent me mail, well then…you know. No, the important part of this story is that my folks came through like the superstars they are and sent me another care package the contents of which included the third season of Arrested Development. Yes, after several months and far too many blog entries to recall without a reference to one of the funniest shows ever made, I am now able to return to the humble origins of this blog. Thank you, mom and dad, you have done me and all the many, many readers of this blog a great service. What would an online journal entitled “Amor Prohibido” be, after all, without Arrested Development?

Ok, so in the event that I spoiled you last week (two weeks ago?) with stories of Presidential helicopters in corn fields and high school girls parading on stage to the hoots and hollers of an entire town, there will be nothing of the sort in this entry. I will tell you instead about some blood spilled—both on a village visit I did last week and in general on the TV news here. First, the village visit: I was in a truck driven by a gentleman working for the Centro de Salud of the municipality and riding with us was my counterpart at the mayor’s office. We were going to visit a tiny community of about 150 people at the absolute top of a massive hill to talk to them about instituting a rainwater collection system in their town. At the moment they have no water system of any kind and the relative elevation of their village means that their options are limited. The roads getting to this town are brutal and, truly, do not see cars pass over them much at all. (Seriously, I talk about how my town has nothing but dirt roads in all directions for hours but I live in the center of a booming metropolis compared to some of the sites I am visiting, this being one of them.) It was not a surprise, then, at a fork in the road nearly half way up the mountain to see a massive tree blocking further passage. This was no doubt due to any of the many storms that have come through recently and who knows how long ago the tree had fallen because the only thing on the other side of it was the village we were going to visit and I doubt they leave their perch very often.

We had in the back of the truck a moto because the mayor’s office guy had to run an errand even further out later on that day and the roads in that direction are not wide enough for a truck. There was no way to cut the tree and move it aside because we didn’t have a machete or ax so we decided the moto was our only option. Now during the discussion of what to do not once did walking the rest of the way even come into consideration for the gentlemen I was with, despite that we had clearly gone the majority of the way. Well I decided to show them who was the man and announced that I would hike to the town while the gentleman from the Centro de Salud rode the moto. Obviously, stupid on my part—but that’s not the point of this story. Three hundred meters in elevation and forty minutes after I began my trek (covered in sweat and still not having arrived at the village), I come across a man coming down the mountain on horseback. We exchange greetings and I ask him how much further to the town. He says another twenty minutes or so on foot, and I understand this part clearly, but then he goes into something about how “the man with the moto is coming back down right now behind me because there was an accident and I’m bleeding”. I was confused but understood that he was injured and I asked where and he directed me to the other side of his horse and pointed at his foot—there was a white rag tied around his foot covered in blood.

The man continued on down the road and I continued up, expecting to see my moto guy and get some better idea of what happened. Sure enough within two minutes the moto comes tearing around a corner and I flag him down and ask “How’d it go”, not really sure where the bloody foot guy fit into things and mostly asking about the rainwater presentation to the town. He answered very bluntly: “Not well. There weren’t many people available for the talk and then a man asked for a ride on the moto and we started to go and his shoelace got caught in the wheel and cut his foot up.” And that was pretty much that. We all went back down the mountain, got the man into the truck, strapped the moto down and went into the centro de salud in the nearest town. Once we were there and the injured man was receiving care from the medics, I took a look at the wound. From one side of his ankle all the way around the back to the other side was sliced open—his foot didn’t get ground up in the spokes but must have been cut by the disc which the spokes rotate on. Anyway, the cut was deep, deep enough that I worried that his Achilles tendon might have been severed. Apparently not, though, because the docs cleaned the wound and stitched him back up—18 stitches on one ankle! The whole time this man did not so much as grimace despite the fact that it looked like his heel might fall off. Calm and collected under excruciating circumstances. Unreal.

Now let’s move to blood spilled on the TV news. I figure you guys want bits of life down here every once and awhile and not just the exciting stories of romance and world-saving that I involve myself in on a day to day basis. So here it is: in Honduras the television news programs show things that I have not seen in R-rated movies…and they do it all the time. There is no warning either, no “what you are about to see may disturb you…” etc. They’re just talking about the news and then BAM—and you throw up in your mouth!! I’m going to give you just a couple examples, so you get the idea, but rest assured these are not the worst I have seen in my brief time down here. What you are about to read may disturb you, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t want to picture a couple unsettling images as you sit there in front of the computer. First one comes from a recent flood that hit the capital and while that got most of the footage they did stop to do a side story about how the commotion of the flood gave a new mother the chance to dispose of her unwanted child. Yup, then they cut to a shot of a plastic bag opened with a newborn baby inside, still covered in blood and clearly dead. Second one is a little more intriguing, no less disturbing. A couple of men were picked up on charges of having raped and murdered two five year old boys recently. The other prisoners knew of their alleged crimes as well, because within three hours of first arriving to the prison the men were burned alive. I missed the back story initially and walked into the TV room in my host family’s house and saw what looked to be a burned log in the middle of a concrete patio. And then I saw the kicker: a human arm extending sideways from the “burned log.” Yeah, the arm from the elbow up was completely normal but the body was unrecognizable as human; just a large, coal-black mass covered in flakes occasionally blowing away in the breeze. It can make mealtime an adventure.

On the lighter side of news, I was very pleased to see the US National Team win the Copa de Oro last week. You are all Americans and currently living in the US, so this regional tournament of the world’s most popular sport likely passed undetected on your sports radar (ie Sportscenter)—if I was in the States it would have happened to me, too. Anyway, the national teams from North America, Central America, and the Caribbean were represented—12 teams in all. The entire tournament was played in the States, too, with Mexico and Team USA being the heavy favorites. In fact, in the 8 times that this tournament had happened leading up to this year’s event, the USA and Mexico had won it between them 7 times. The only other team to win the tournament is Canada, so it is not a small thorn in the side of Central America that only teams north of C.A. have won it. This year’s final ended up being between USA and Mexico, of course, and the yanks came from behind to win 2-1. ¡Excelente! Next up for the US is the Copa America, which takes place in Venezuela (it started this week) and features all South American teams and also the US and Mexico. The US has gained significantly in worldwide stature in recent years (despite the ’06 World Cup) and we look good heading into this tournament having just won the Copa de Oro, but with teams like Brasil and Argentina around our boys are definitely not the favorites.

In Peace Corps news there is good and there is bad. The good is that my work has actually picked up a lot in recent weeks and I have barely had time to do leisure reading, let alone multiple viewings of the same movies. There have been many visits to villages to see what kind of water issues they are having and mostly these end without any blood shed on anyone’s part. There is also the occasional town meeting type event, where I basically introduce myself and sit back down and that’s it, but those have been great for meeting community representatives one on one and discussing problems to be fixed. So the work is good and at times has made me feel like I am actually beginning to do something here. The bad news is that recently three people I know pretty well decided to go back home for good. One of these was a close friend who left suddenly and since I haven’t been able to check email in almost two weeks I don’t know the details, just that he’s gone. The other two were people in my wat/san group as well and both were solid. I’m not going to pretend I know how Peace Corps life goes and how this impacts things specifically, but I do know that after a few months in my site I was looking forward to reuniting with people I trained with and know fairly well and that now these people will not be there. But what can you do besides go one day at a time. As the wise people at Sportscenter have said, “So-and-so is listed as day to day…but aren’t we all.”

To conclude this entry I will return to something I began last time, a “housing” update. In the last edition I talked about the imminent joys of living solo and described the place I had found, etc. Well I had made arrangements to rent this particular house and the people left in charge of it (the owner is in the States) assured me they would spend the next couple of weeks “fixing things up”. There has not been so much in the way of “fixing things up,” unfortunately, and the other thing is that while this house is pretty cool its location leaves something to be desired. On one side is the town liquor store and down the other side no more than ten meters is a pool hall, reknowned in Honduras for being filled with the town drunks and bums. Excellent. Now safety is not an issue because there are bars on the windows and the house has a wall and gate around it besides and since Hondurans love to put barbed wire on things, there is barbed wire snaking around the top of the gate and wall. But nearly every time I walk by now to check to see if anything is being “fixed”, I have noticed drunks passed out right in front of my new house-to-be. This is going to be fun. More to come from me, I hope all of you are doing well. Much love, Joe