Honduras

Ahuas, Honduras

Grace grew up in Ahuas, Honduras: a remote village on the north coast  where her father practiced medicine in the clinic that her grandfather founded.  In the first week of March, Grace, Benno, Teresa, and I went back for a visit. Grace spent a little time working in the clinic, but mostly this was a visit to old friends, and an opportunity for Grace to show me a piece of her childhood.

Ahuas is a pastoral village, clothed in pine, palm, and banana trees. Cattle, horses,  and chickens roam freely among stilt-houses built of rough-cut pine or, less frequently, concrete. Galvanized steel is the most common roofing material, but a few houses were thatched with palm leaves. Much of this was as I had imagined. The only really shocking thing was the prevalence of bright red satellite TV dishes - the richer homes have electricity from a diesel generator between 6:00 and 10:00 pm. This was merely one outer sign of the strange amalgam of agrarian poverty and high-tech that pervades much of the developing world. We saw the same with the Masaai in Kenya: spear in one hand, cell phone in the other.

50 lbs of medical supplies on my back

Getting to the village was an adventure. We landed in San Pedro Sula, caught a bus, another plane, a speed boat, and finally rode in the bed of pickup truck for the last five miles. Fortunately the travel wasn't all crammed into one day. We had a rest day after the bus ride and got to soak up a little tropical sun on Utila, a small and little-known island overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, Roatan.

Benno negotiates with taxi drivers by walking away from them, bags in hand. While both amusing and effective, it wasn't always clear how far we were going to have to drag our bags - loaded with ~100 lbs of medical supplies between the four of us. It was never very far. But when we got off the plane in Puerto Lempira, he just kept walking. As this stretched into a couple of blocks, Grace and Teresa and I were giving each other skeptical looks! As before, though, he knew what he was doing. It was only a block or two more to the dock where our boat waited. We had some time to kill before the boat headed up-river. So we spent the morning breakfasting, lounging on the shore in a lovely sea breeze and the shade of coconut palms.

Eventually the boat left, and did so with a vengeance. I had expected a slow lazy ride, but according to Benno's GPS watch we hit 50 mph on the open bay. I'm sure we slowed down some when we entered the mangroves swamps, followed by the narrow Ribra river, but it didn't feel like it! I think the pilot/driver enjoys his job!

savannah trek

Once in Ahuas, we settled in to stay with good friends of Benno and Teresa, Sanabria and Olena. They showed immense hospitality throughout our visit, and it started the minute we arrived: a fresh coconut for each of us.

The three full days we had in the village were spent variously, working in the clinic, visiting old friends, and going on a couple of cool excursions. On the 2nd day we took a hike out to a swimming hole in the Ribra river, about 4 miles outside of town. A beautiful walk through the savannah led to a narrow strip of jungle, and an excellent cooling swim. The mosquitoes were fierce in the jungle, and unfortunately followed us to the river on the backs of the three village dogs that had adopted us for the day. We would escape by swimming away, which worked great until one of the dogs came out to us for a visit!

fishing

On our third day one of Benno's good friends Ebanor took us fishing in his dugout canoe. We spent most of the morning casting fruitlessly, only catching one moderate (10") something-or-other. Then we headed back to Ebanor plantation, and in about an hour his family caught 10 fat tilapia for lunch by swim-dragging a net through their private pond. This was another example of the extraordinary hospitality we received. Fire-roasted and served with rice and a yuca cousin, it made a delicious meal.

All of a sudden it was time to leave. Instead of reversing our tortuous route in, we got  Jarly, one of the  missionary pilots, to fly us directly to San Pedro Sula. This turned out to be a great opportunity to observe the extent of cocaine trafficking through Honduran air-space. He pointed out at least ten illicit air-strips hacked out of the wilderness, along with the debris of several burned-out planes. Apparently it's just easier (and presumably less risky) to destroy them than try to re-use them. It was also on this last day that we heard there had been a major gun battle between cartels in Puerto Lempira the previous night. Multiple dead; houses burned. All of this was a big change from how things were when Grace's family lived there.

All in all, it was a fantastic trip! It was quite a unique adventure.

I took LOTS of photos. You can find below the small fraction that I thought worth keeping.