Street Noise!

It’s been an interesting month in my barrio.

At the end of March, I realized that there was this horrendously loud noise coming from the street behind my apartment. It seemed to consist of an air compressor and some sort of metal cutting blade and would go on and off for hours at a time.

My first thought was “Oh no, someone’s started an auto body shop in their yard!” which has been known to happen as there are industrial shops right next door to family homes in most barrios.

After a couple days, it appeared that the noise had moved off somewhat and that’s when my curiosity kicked in. So off I went, following my ears and discovered some pretty big changes just around the corner!

Great mounds of dirt and debris right in the middle of the intersections, huge, gaping holes in the pavement and a series of lines cut into the pavement of the streets of the whole neighbourhood. I found it quite amusing to be able to simply climb right up on the piles to take photos without being questioned or stopped by anyone. No barricades to protect pedestrians from themselves, taxis and private cars slowly creeping around various mounds in order to traverse the streets and not a worker in sight.

The work is progressing, slowly but surely and has now reached the point where some of the underground infrastructure is being established. I’ve learned that this whole endeavour is to provide “black water” (sewage) lines from individual homes, to a central pipe and thus (hopefully, though I’m not certain!) to a treatment plant.

There aren’t a lot of technical or specialized tools used. If you look closely, you can see the nylon line tied to the rock and stick that is used for establishing the cutting lines. I’m left wondering whether or not there will be powered jack hammers or simply labourers with pick axes used when it comes time to lift the segments of asphalt.

I do find it quite disturbing to watch both the operator and helper of the machine that is used to cut the pavement lines. Yes, they have hard hats, a short sleeved over shirt and work boots but I have yet to see hearing protection, work gloves or any form of air mask! The residents are curious about the work but at the same time terribly accepting of the overwhelming noise levels, with an attitude of “it has to happen”.

I’m leaving the country in a couple of days so sadly won’t be able to keep a complete record of this major project though I am hoping that it will be completed before I come back again next winter!

Anyone interested in taking their life in their hands and getting a job in La Ceiba?

Who Deserves the Better Home?

As you know, La Ceiba and the rest of Honduras, is a third world country with appalling rates of poverty, a severe lack of basic services like potable water and decent housing and gaping holes in the education (and availability thereof) system.

There is also an increasing level of visible and active organized religions, primarily Catholic but increasingly there are various Evangelical groups. I am grossly uneducated regarding just how many religions there are, their specific names and how they function but at the same time, I’ll just state my basic philosophy regarding organized religion. Bluntly.

I am a casually practising Pagan, with a basic belief in the Mother Earth and my immediate connection with Her. Mutual respect is my primary ethic and because of this I expect myself to respect other people’s religious and spiritual choices. I honestly believe that each person’s choice of personal belief is based on the premise of providing themselves with a form of assistance, comfort and support through either private rituals or group practises. I also regard this as a primarily positive endeavour on the part of the individual.

There are times that I find myself highly frustrated with the fact that though religion may be a great theory, it is only as good as the individuals involved.

Colonia Miramar is one of the poorer barrios in La Ceiba, located at the west end of the beach area.

Barrio Ingles is equally poor though somewhat more centrally located, on the beach and bordered by a sewage canal. Both neighbourhoods are near to where I live and I frequently walk through the streets and am a witness to the varying levels of housing that people survive, and only occasionally thrive, in.

The poorest homes are small, with marginal security and appear to be not terribly weather proof, to put it mildly. I take a lot of photographs during my “walking adventures” yet at the same time find myself unwilling to intrude or impose myself on the local people. Yes, I feel marginally shamed by the fact that I am (technically) a rich gringa and also regard it as incredibly rude to snap pictures of living conditions thus embarrassing or exposing the people living in same. That said, I still manage to acquire a broad spectrum of real photographs.

I recently strolled down a new road for me, in the impoverished Miramar barrio and discovered a huge, newly constructed, highly secure and well maintained “iglesia” (church) for a local religious group.

I am completely incensed when I think of the money involved in this structure and its grounds, for the comfort and ease of its membership when I think of all of the men, women and children, in this very same barrio, who would honestly benefit from clean drinking water, proper tin roofs, real doors and even windows in their own small homes!

This is something that I cannot respect, regardless of my ethics and even though it happens all over the world, for numerous self absolving reasons, I actively resent being a witness to such a misplaced waste of time, energy and money. All I can think of is the good that could be accomplished if these same people actually went into their own (or adopted) community and physically practised what they profess to believe.

I also acknowledge that there are many religious people in this country who do actively practise what they preach, and I do respect them and thank them for their efforts. So I’m not completely on a rip and tear rant here folks, just blunt like I said I would be.

Construction, La Ceiba Style

I’ve watched many changes La Ceiba over the last five years, some good and some not but I am constantly fascinated by the very basic approaches that are taken to accomplish various projects, large and small.

I’ll also admit to a certain macabre fascination at the lack of safety, health and environmental standards that I have witnessed. I’ve done a fair amount of construction myself therefore have some experience with the health and safety requirements of the workplace in Canada. All I say is that if any of “our” standards were imposed here, nothing would be accomplished! Yes, I do believe that there should be improvements to protect the workers but at the same time I still have to admire the sheer audacity of how things are done here.

















There was the day that I stopped for photographs of the men who were taking a large limb off of one of the trees in the Central Park Square. This is a very busy part of the downtown core and there were no barricades or crowd control, as you can from the men sitting in the bench watching with some trepidation. Myself, I was impressed that the workers were using a ladder and had also tied a rope to said limb in order to control the fall. Yet the worker in the tree was using only a machete to chop his way through the limb, non grip sole shoes and no gloves. Thankfully, the mission was successful with no injuries!










One enterprising individual decided to build a street side vendor stall, brought in his supplies and started his construction, right in the midst of the busy street life of the market in full swing. I have a real fear of electricity and simply couldn’t believe the casualness of his standing above ground, his hammer and various overhead lines tucked under his elbow as he positioned the roof brace.














The cement was mixed on the street and the structure simply lifted up and placed into coffee cans of concrete in order to both brace it and to prevent its “accidental” removal. This stall was completed the following day, with its “for rent” sign and in the month following its completion, I have yet to see it used.










There is a phenomenal amount of concrete construction all over La Ceiba and on one of the busier downtown core streets I’ve watched a two storey building progressing over the last two months.



Concrete is mixed in a pile right on the street surface and carried in 5 gallon buckets or wheelbarrows to where it is needed, building debris is piled on the sidewalk or street, supplies are piled wherever there is space and life continues in and around the construction site with no consideration for pedestrians or traffic. You can see the roasted corn vendor who has maintained his working space right at the edge of the building site, complete with airborne debris and his food sales are probably booming given the proximity to the work site.

The men work in whatever clothing or shoes they possess, I have rarely seen work gloves and have never seen a hardhat on a construction site. There are no safety harnesses, telescoping ladders, power tools and only the most rudimentary hand tools. Yet, these projects are completed!

Street Vendor's Reality

I have a friend in La Ceiba, whose name is Marcos and he is a 46 year old Honduran who works for a living selling small goods on the street. Marcos is one of the more fortunate street vendors. He is pretty much fully bilingual, a practising Christian that in five years I have never seen (nor heard of) take a drink of alcohol, smoke a cigarette, use illegal drugs, swear or express a violent thought or threat. He has been raised with courtly “old fashioned” manners, is fastidious about his clothing and person hygiene and has always treated me as a proper “lady” regardless of my choices to enjoy a beer or smoke a cigarette in public. Sadly, he is also becoming increasingly deaf with no medical assistance.

There are many other street vendors who sell CD’s and DVD’s; women who sell hand towels and sandals; children selling packets of gum; young and old men who dangle their handfuls of shell, coral or coconut shell jewellery; elders who sell hair clips, school supplies and small household items arranged on a board to be hand carried with extra items in their backpacks or plastic shoulder bags.

There are the Garifuna women who walk about with large plastic tubs carried on their heads, of coconut breads and candy, casaba or fresh coconuts whereby they machete them open, plunk in a straw and you can drink the watery milk. There are also the vendors, of all ages, that sell food, drinks and snacks at the bus depots throughout the city.

Marcos’ self employment as a street vendor means that he walks miles, daily, in order to meet up with more prosperous folks and attempts to sell them watches, belts, wallets, perfumes, and the occasional oddity like a photo frame clock or new tennis shoes.

This system works whereby the vendor will buy an item like a watch for 150 lp and then attempt to sell it for as much as 250 lp; a leather wallet will cost 80 lp with a resale value of 150 lp; perfumes or aftershaves 50 lp for resale at 80 lp. Got the idea, folks?

Well, add in the reality that these street vendors walk miles every day in either the heat, humidity or rain of La Ceiba, to cover their circuits of bars, eateries, markets, tourist gathering places and any other potential buyer sites, putting on their public persona of being genial, reasonably low key marketers who constantly face varying degrees of mild to incredibly rude refusals.

Now add in the fact that there are usually a very small number of potential buyers and the additional fact the majority of these few potential buyers always try and barter down the price.

This is how these people attempt to earn enough money every day to buy a meal, a soda, a bed to sleep in that night, support others in their families, as well as enough money to make up for the days when there are no sales, no buyers and horrendous weather that keeps even them hunkered down indoors, some place, any place.

Marcos had his house broke into (the fourth time that I know of in the last three years) last month and literally had every piece of clothing, foot wear, small personal goods and all of his vending materials stolen. He explained to me that it was the people who steal to buy drugs who did it and that there are many of them in his neighbourhood. His only solution was to hope to be home another time when they broke in again, remember who they were and report them to the police.

He was also as close to totally defeated as I have ever seen him. Left with absolutely no potential of retrieving his personal goods, no goods to sell to buy a meal for the day, no decent clothes or shoes to work in, absolutely nothing but what he was wearing on his back. He is also a proud man who has never asked me for a single lempira in the whole time I’ve known him, even refusing my offers to buy him a soda while we are visiting if he has just eaten and is full or so he says. Needless to say, I did slip 100 lp out of my wallet while we were talking, fold it up small and slip it into his hand simply saying “a little something to help, Marcos.”

The reason why I am writing this is that there are some gringos here who are grossly misinformed enough to make comments stating that “these people have no interest in working for a living”; “they’re all lazy”; “you can’t do anything to help because they just don’t care” and other equally racist statements. I no longer try to educate those stupider than myself; I refuse to discuss their opinions and frequently resort to saying simply “just watch, could you do that and for how long?”

There’s a lot more behind the scenes of the waving palm trees and beach sand in La Ceiba.

PS It’s been a month now and Marcos has managed to acquire enough goods to start selling and supporting himself again. No thanks to anyone but his own indomitable spirit!

Garbage AKA Basura

Over the past years, I’ve spent many, many hours walking simply everywhere in La Ceiba and with my curious greedy eyes I see a lot of the small details of daily life.

Garbage is a huge problem here in the city and on the beaches. The Hotel Majestic in Colonia La Alhambra has two 45 gallon barrels out front for their garbage and by collection day, you can’t see the barrels for everything that is either bagged up or spread loose around them.

Sadly it’s common to see a commercially sponsored half barrel labelled “Basura” that is empty while the ground six feet around it is completely obliterated with plastic and paper trash. You find it stacked in and on top the raised bins for collection, strewn on the ground, blowing down the roadways, dumped in alleys and ditches, stacked at the edges of the railway tracks, piled on the boulevards, simply and literally everywhere.

Canada has a reputation in Honduras for being a clean country that people regard with appreciation and I try to explain that children are taught from an early age that garbage is to be contained and that littering, the act of dropping small bits on the ground, is actually against the law. Frequently, this is met with that polite but quizzical look of mild disbelief and the conversational topic is changed. There is absolutely no educational process whereby the majority of people are taught to keep garbage contained for health and ascetic reasons.

By the same token, many people who are working, middle class and higher social strata work diligently, daily, to keep their homes, courtyards and boulevards as clean as any you could hope to find anywhere.

In the downtown areas, I have frequently seen the small armies that of solitary women with their push brooms and long handled whisk pans who sweep the curb sides of the main streets. Some even have their two wheeled garbage bins with bags and brooms tucked along side that they trundle along on their specific circuits.

I am not certain, but I believe these women receive a very small pittance from the municipality with the hope of monetary assistance from the business owners that their cleaning areas cover. Needless to say, these are the extreme of the lowest working class earners.

There is also a municipality organized schedule of garbage pickup in the various areas of La Ceiba. I have learned that my barrio, Colonia La Alhambra has their pickup day on the Tuesday of the week and have watched the process.

It’s an open back 5 ton truck, wooden sided with no back gate with a driver, two or three “runners” and two more workers right in the back of the truck. The truck drives along slowly while the runners grab huge bales, bags and oversized plastic barrels of trash and force or throw them up into the back of the truck. The workers in the truck then try to force it forward and on top of what is already there. None of these workers have safety boots, work or rubber gloves, masks or sometimes even long pants. No rakes to bundle up whatever has come loose, so it stays behind on the ground.

This past year I’ve noticed that there is now a market for scrap metal and some form of recycling for plastic bottles and aluminium cans which now means that there are more people digging through the trash that is put out, looking for said items. It also means that the actual garbage collectors are opening bags and going through them (bare handed!) to separate out those items that could be sold for cash.

Yes, it’s an incremental step towards an effort to recycle and curb garbage but sadly at this early stage of the game, it only makes the problem worse with even more loose garbage spread about willy nilly.

Lemonadia

One of the advantages to a very slow paced life here in La Ceiba is the simple fact that there is time. Time to watch sunrises with a morning coffee, time to sit and watch drunken butterflies stagger by, time to simply wash your soul clean of all foolish stresses and nagging concerns that plague so many of us up north and sadly, even here.

One thing it also means is that I’ve got the time to wonder and explore and follow up on my little curiosities in life. My latest adventure was to wake one morning to the most delicious scent and following my nose, I opened the main door to the patio and soon made my discovery.

It was something light, delicate and mildly orange-citrus and I finally tracked it down to coming from the neighbours’ tree which just crests the patio wall. It’s covered with new clusters of tiny white flowers, bursting with gnats, flies and butterflies all feeding franticly and home to a number of my favourite little green lizards. It really reminded me of the smell of the mock orange from the house in Canada.

Dona Lucy, who takes quite a level of amusement with me and my wonderment, informed me that it was called “Lemonadia” as she noticed me hanging over the edge of the patio, snapping photos. As I kept repeating, “lemonadia, lemonadia, lemonadia” to myself (one to remember the name and secondly to pronounce it properly) she had another of her giggling episodes, shaking her head at this childlike middle aged woman who drifts through life at the top of her house.

One thing that I have noticed it that this tree seems to have a monthly cycle of new blossoms that last about 3 days is full effect, completely wither and fall over the next couple days, continues to produce shiny new leaves and then starts its blossoms all over again the following month.

Just one of the little things I’ve learned recently!

Sunsets on the Caribbean Sea

I admit that I have a slight fetish with photographing sunsets over the Caribbean Sea but for those who share the same passion, enjoy!

Sunset series from the Tranquillo Bar, Utila, Bay Islands, taken in February 2008.

Series taken at Zona Viva Playa, during Semana Santa, March 18th, 2008

Sunsets at Miramar Playa, March 16th, 2008

One of my own favorites, taken from the La Ceiba dock January 5th, 2008!