Fascinating: Beautiful white sand beaches where mostly Hondurans vacation and not Americans. The cruise ships call this stop “Banana Coast” probably to not scare people who google “Honduras” and find out it’s the most violent country in the world outside war zones.
Exhausting: we drove TWELVE hours from Trujillo to Tegucigalpa. TWELVE. I’m tempted to sit on a pencil to retain the crack between my buttocks!
Informative: The northern communities have an incredibly positive view of MSF – starting 40 years ago with Hurricane Fifi, Hurricane Mitch, maternity programs, HIV programs before they were widely available, and the list goes on. Rarely did we have to introduce ourselves.
The northern area is lush grazing land for cattle – mostly milk production as evidenced by horses carrying big metal containers on either side of the saddle, going to market? The vast banana palm farms give way to the “African palms” – native forests (I can imagine what this used to look like when covered with native mahogany and other native trees) now cut down for huge scale production of palm oil … It’s not the “slash and burn” of small subsistence farmers as we were taught in school. This is industrial scale destruction for economic gain of huge corporations. Sad really. We still see butterflies, and all sorts of different birds, so maybe not all is lost yet.
The roads are dotted with fruit stands – coconuts, watermelons, mango, all sorts of fruits – cheap and plentiful. Fish is only a hook toss away. Yet in this lush landscape, where food is abundant, people still complain of “lack of economic opportunities” as the reason for migrating to the US. We don’t hear “violence” as a reason in the north. Yet, it costs about $6000 – 7000 to pay a coyote to take them all the way to their US destination, and that’s after riding the train La Bestia all through Mexico. Most have family members in the US who send for them, and few unaccompanied minors other than those who are going to reunite with their parents.
