Las Jaguitas

This has been one of the hardest blog entries for me to write by far. There have been plenty of thoughts running through my head these days, but getting it all down on paper has been a real challenge. You see, I cut my right hand while sharpening my machete the other day, and so for now I’m forced to grip the pen with my first few fingers and without the help of my thumb…

It was just after 6am, the hour that I show up to work each day, and I’m crouched down running my file over the machete preparing to do some serious damage to the overgrown brush I was sent to chop down with my other coworkers. After 95% of the machete is razor sharp, and I’m putting an edge on the very tip, the machete slips, and the nice sharp edge slides down the side of my hand. “I told you to be careful,” Armando remarks, without a hint of compassion, despite the blood running off my hand and onto my pants. “Hold still,” says Juan as he takes a small rag and wraps it around my thumb to slow the bleeding. Luckily it wasn’t bad enough to need stiches, so now it’s just slowly healing.

So I was actually able to find a job. It’s at a nearby farm that has 25 acres of plantain, coffee, and orange trees planted. We start work at 6am, and finish about noon everyday. It also has plenty of big, beautiful cedar and mohagany trees, among others. It’s really a beautiful place to work. In fact, the other day while working in the coffee, a howler monkey shit on me. Sure it smelled bad, but one has to be thankful to work in an environment as wild as this one is. Most days at work, my five coworkers and I are “volando machete,” or “flying our machetes,” which turns out to be unfortunately accurate sometimes, as I´ve seen the machetes slip out of someone´s sweaty hand as we´re working. We pass the days cutting down tall grass, maintaining and harvesting the plantains, and cutting grass for the horses to eat in the evenings. And as a reward for our hard work, we get paid a daily wage of 95 cordobas, or about $3.50. When I was working overtime on the cargo ships, I could make that in eight minutes…

Several friends of mine that I´ve come to know over the years of visiting this pueblo on TCU Spring Break trips helped me build my house. Misael, my closest friend here in the community, and his family had some empty space on their propery, and they graciously allowed me to set up shop there. The walls and roof of the house are made of sheet metal, and the floor is dirt, which classifies more or less as a lower middle class house here. Nicer houses are made of cinder block with a concrete floor, and poorer houses are made sheets of vinyl and bamboo. My kitchen is tacked on to the side of the house, where I light up the firewood each time I want to cook. The latrine and bathing areas are behind it. The most grueling aspect of the construction was digging the latrine. The hole is one meter by one meter wide, and all of the locals insisted that I dig it five meters deep. I think it will take me the rest of my life to fill it halfway up, but considering they´re the experts on latrines and not me, I went along with what they said. I don’t think I´ve ever sweat so much in my entire life, as I did digging that damn hole.

During the month or so that I was building my house, I stayed at a nearby retreat center that is run by several nuns. While I was there, there was an eight day retreat based on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and since one of the nuns invited me to attend, I decided to go. The Jesuit priest who directed the retreat was exceptional, and an expert at helping you to see the darkness inside of yourself and your own participation in the evils and injustices of the world. I, as well as many of the other participants in the retreats are fans of liberation theology, and tend to blame a lot of the injustices of the world on corrupt governments and large corporations. However, this priest helped all of us to see how we too are guilty, and need to struggle each day to recognize the injustices we create in the world, and the ways we oppress others.

Around that same time, the massacre in Las Jaguitas occurred. It didn´t make international news, but here in Nicaragua, it was a big deal. Basically, the police had set up a drug bust, and dressed themselves in civilian clothes and ski masks. They positioned themselves in a certain dangerous part of town, and prepared to stop a car that they believed to be full of drug traffickers. As the car approached, and the driver saw the masked men, he tried to speed off. The police opened fire, shooting to kill, and were quite successful. However, the car wasn´t being driven by drug traffickers, it was being driven by an innocent man and his family. They had tried to speed off, believing the masked men to be assailants, and only the father survived the police´s onslaught. The wife and children died. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offered his condolences, but was quick to justify it as collateral damage of the ever important was on drugs. The policemen involved were convicted of negligent man slaughter instead of homicide, and received a very light jail sentence. No highly ranked official was ever tried.

Needless to say, much of the country was up in arms over the lack of respect for life and coverup by the police and government (which are basically the same entity here). One night while talking with a friend of mine, we began to argue about the situation. What aspect was the most troubling? What was the most threatening to the people of Nicaragua? Was it the fact that the innocent children were slaughtered, or the fact that the police apparently had orders to shoot to kill without the need to identify the targets, much less send the suspects to trial before being convicted? We argued from all different angles, each one of us convinced of our correctness. Soon I realized that I was evening listening to what my friend was saying, but instead only trying to craft my argument so that I could be declared the victor and show my intellectual superiority. I wasn´t interested in finding the truth of the situation, only in defending my pride. And then it dawned on me: my thought process in that situation was probably the exact same as President Ortega´s when he learned of the Las Jaguita´s massacre. I´m sure that as soon as he heard, he began crafting his argument to best defend his and his government´s position. Looking how to hide the weaknesses in his argument. How to protect his pride and power. I´m sure he wasn´t interested in listening to the opposition´s opinion, or seeking out the truth of the situation. The very same thought processes that I was following in my argument were the same ones that President Ortega utilized to make a mockery out of the justice system of Nicaragua and disrespect the innocent, slaughtered family. Had I been in his shoes, drunk with power and my own pride, I might have done the very same thing.

It made me think back on my retreat a few months ago, and how the priest challenged us to look inside of us each day to seek out the evils we hide inside. If we want to fight the injustices of the world, we must first fight the injustices within. We are all part of the problem, and we must all be part of the solution. It´s easy to throw stones at Daniel Ortega from a distance, and blame all of the country´s problems on him, but it´s a lot more difficult to stop and look inside and seek out the ways that I too am part of the problem. The corrupt governments and huge corporations are guilty, and we, as the society that supports and protects them, are guilty too. As Ghandi once said, we must be the change we wish to see in the world. 

Ortega Vende Patria!

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people took to the streets of Juigalpa, Nicaragua this past Saturday, June 13^th, to protest the construction of the interoceanic canal. Over a year ago, Chinese billionaire, Wang Jing, with his company HKND (Hong Kong Nicaragua Development) Group, convinced the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the rest of his government to grant them access to the land of Nicaragua in order to build a canal deeper and wider (as well as much longer) than the one in Panama. However, many of the citizens of Nicaragua, especially those who will be forcibly removed from their land, are not too happy about the decision. This past Saturday, thousands of Nicaraguans, from all over the country, filled the streets with chants of:

¿Que quieren los campesinos?...

¡Que se vayan los chinos!

What do the people want?...

That the Chinese get out!

Of course it has a better ring to it in Spanish.

Environmental concerns, socioeconomic concerns, and a lack of transparency by the Nicaraguan government as well as HKND Group have many, inside and out of Nicaragua, wondering if this megaproject is such a good idea. Even the U.S. Embassy, not known historically for their support of the Nicaraguan poor, issued a statement citing their concern over the lack of transparency.

The only thing lacking from the scene this past Saturday was the Nicaraguan press. During the 80s, Ortega’s government used military force to silence the media that was critical of their actions. Now they have discovered that it is much more socially acceptable to just pay them off; the majority of news outlets in Nicaragua are considered to be on Ortega’s payroll. How else do you justify the extremely limited coverage of the largest protest to date concerning the highly controversial project. Controlling the international press has been a little tougher, however, and Ortega’s had to resort to harassment and detainment by military and police, as well as revocation of permission to be in the country.

This past Saturday, I woke up at 3:15 am, and began traveling towards Juigalpa, with two of my Nicaraguan friends. We made it there by 11, just in time to see the multitude of people cresting the hill and peacefully marching down towards town square. They were led by a banner which read:

Daniel Vende Patria

Daniel is Selling the Homeland

Many in Nicaragua, having a history of their natural resources being extracted and used for profit by foreigners, view the contract signed by their government and the Chinese development company as the selling off of lands for others profit.

It was inspiring to see thousands of people who had travelled from all corners of Nicaragua in boat and bus, peacefully standing up for their rights. It remains to be seen, however, if their chants will be heard, or if the never ending lust for the almighty dollar will prevail.

I got back home that night at 9pm, exhausted, but animated by the energy of the people, and their will to protect one another and the environment.

So… I am back in Central America. But this time in Nicaragua, not Honduras. I just recently got here, after spending the last six months in Wichita Falls catching up with family and friends, and enjoying hamburgers, french fries, and Shiner Bock. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoyed my time in the States, but I felt like I needed to come back to Central America.

The last three years in Honduras have been an education for me in many ways. I began to know and learn more about areas of life that before I had little or no experience of. At the orphanage, I got a small taste of what human suffering comes from not having a family. How that affects a child, and what can become of it. But I also learned about the slow upward march of overcoming struggles, of finding joy in the darkness, and clinging to one another when times are hard. I also learned about how the majority of the world lives: in a material poverty. It was a type of poverty that I had seen before, but hadn’t known very intimately. “The poor” were no longer people I heard about in Sunday sermons or saw on TV commercials asking for money, but they were my friends next door, the guys I played soccer with, the people I drank coffee with. Honduras opened my eyes in many ways, and for that I’m very grateful.

However, leaving the Farm didn’t feel like a chapter of my life that I read and then could turn the page on. It felt more like the beginning of a book, and that I was only a few chapters into it. So I have decided to return to Central America, and continue on this journey, not knowing where it will lead, or what God has in store for me, but confident that I am taking a step in the right direction. I am living in a small village called Tepeyac, several miles outside of Granada, Nicaragua, where I have visited many times before during Spring Break trips with TCU, as well as during the previous years while I lived close by in Honduras. Thankfully, because of my past experiences here, I have several friends, and one is allowing me to put up a small, one room, sheet metal hut on their land where I will live. In the meantime, while I am gathering materials and digging the latrine, I am staying at a retreat center located on the edge of the village run by several wonderful nuns.

My plan is to live here like the average Nicaraguan does. In a small, one room shack, looking for work in the fields or in construction, and living off of whatever I can make. The goal is not to bring any particular “service” to the community. Obviously I will work with them in whatever way I can, but I won’t be working with any particular nonprofit organization or on any particular project. I will just be living and working, much like they do, and trying to get a better understanding of material poverty from the inside.

I heard a quote once, from a woman named Lilla Watson, an indigenous Australian and activist, and it rang true with me and what I feel like my role here is. She said:

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I didn’t decide to move back to Central America because I feel like I am needed here. I decided to move back because I feel like I need to be here. For my own inner peace and fulfillment, and because I feel that slowly, step by step, we can work together for a more peaceful world for all of us.

That being said, I do miss the hamburgers and fries…

Help The Children Of The Farm!

For any of you who've read this blog before, you know about the Farm of the Child, where I've spent the last three years volunteering. Though I am now currently back in the United States, I remain close with the children of the Farm, and therefore I've organized a fundraiser to provide them with more tools to maximize their talents and brighten their futures.

Although northern Honduras is rich in natural beauty: the clear blue ocean, rolling mountains, and beautiful rivers, job opportunities are scarce. Outside of earning meager wages in agriculture or hard labor, there isn’t much. Permanent, full time jobs are hard to come by. Most have part time work in the fields or in small businesses, eking out a living in whatever way they can. However, there are a few emerging areas that look promising, two of them being tourism and technology. So the volunteers and staff of Farm of the Child are hoping to equip the children that live there, as well as those in the surrounding villages, with the tools they need to go out and find success in these areas. The key tools they need are English and computer skills.

There is currently a small computer lab attached to the school of the Farm, where teachers and volunteers have computer classes and English classes (using computer programs to enhance the learning and strengthen computer skills at the same time). However, the computers are exceedingly old and often function poorly, if at all. Not to mention the electricity is extremely unreliable, and students miss tons of class time because of frequent power outages.

In order to bring a functioning, reliable computer lab to the children of rural Honduras, we are trying to raise $4800 in order to buy backup generators and three new computers. Help us create opportunities for these children who have been given very little. Help give them the tools they need to fulfill their dreams and one day earn a respectable living. As the poor are able to pull themselves up out of poverty, through their own hard work and skill, a more just society can be formed.

English language computer program

How to Donate:

Donations of any size, big or small, would be greatly appreciated! 

Clicking on the link below will take you to Farm of the Child’s donation page:

Click Here to Donate

All donations are tax deductible. A letter will be sent to your mailing address that you can use when filing your taxes.

We are hoping to have as many funds as possible raised by April 20th, in order to have the generators and computers placed on a shipping crate that is headed to Honduras very soon. As you can imagine, opportunities to ship supplies overseas without a huge cost are quite rare.

Having spent the last three years volunteering at the Farm of the Child Honduras, I was lucky enough to share my life with these beautiful children. Therefore, ensuring that the children have all the tools possible to enable to them to pursue their dreams is a huge passion of mine. If you have any more questions regarding this fundraiser, or anything else pertaining to the Farm of the Child, feel free to contact me. Thanks!

Sincerely,

Harrison Hanvey

harrisonhanvey@gmail.com 

www.farmofthechild.org

Wrappin' it up

Now that my time volunteering for the Farm of the Child has come to close, I want to write one last blog post, just for old times sake. As the past three years have gone by, my posts have become more and more infrequent, so I thought leaving a good eight months between the last one and this one would be a fitting way to close it out.

One of my favorite students.

My final day at the Farm was December 3^rd, and the weeks leading up to it were fairly emotional. After almost three years, one can become quite accustomed to a certain place and group of people. I’ve spent many beautiful days walking underneath tall trees and seeing the sun breaking over the mountains, with parrots squawking overhead and a cool ocean breeze blowing across my face. I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot during college and the years after, but I’ve never been to a more beautiful place than the humble rural countryside of the northern coast of Honduras. I’ve also met some of the most beautiful and welcoming people there. Many of the Honduran men and women I worked with and got to know inspired me and taught me many things about life I never would have expected to learn. Just under forty children allowed me to enter their lives and walk with them for a short while, and though myself and our organization are far from perfect and couldn’t always provide them with the love and care they deserved, many of them formed a deep and beautiful relationship with me, and also taught many lessons I hope to never forget. They offered me the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen, the most resilient and wild laughs, the most ridiculous senses of humor, and an incredible place to call home. They also gifted me some incredibly frustrating moments in which I wanted to give them a hard smack upside the head, but it turns out that’s frowned upon in children’s home, so from that I guess I reluctantly learned patience and restraint. So on my last night at the Farm, after having visited all of the children and adults, saying our last goodbyes, I fell asleep with full heart. Full of gratitude for the love I’ve encountered and the lessons I’ve learned, but also full of a heaviness knowing this chapter of my life was over. Unfortunately this full-hearted sleep only lasted an hour or two, because I woke up at 4am to get a ride to the bus stop, beginning a two week journey through other Central American countries that would be my, and the other four volunteers leaving with me, last hoorah before heading home.

Those of us who left this December had been planning this trip for months, and once the initial shock of leaving the Farm began to wear off, it turned out to be a great way to end our time in Central America. Our first stop was Nicaragua, where we met up with two former volunteer psychologists whom we had previously worked with in the Farm. We left Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua, and traveled to a smaller town named Jinotega, situated in the mountainous coffee growing region of the country. In this town we encountered a very interesting Nicaraguan tradition called La Griteria, or The Shouting, in English. The name sounded strange, and soon enough we found out its meaning. The Catholic feast day of the Immaculate Conception of Mary falls on December 8^th, and is a highly celebrated holiday in Nicaragua, but the night of the 7^th is when the infamous Griteria occurs. Our Nicaraguan friend with whom we were traveling explained it to us, but we didn’t fully understand the explanation until we were able to experience it for ourselves. After evening mass in the main Cathedral, everyone dispersed and began roaming the streets looking for a house or business that had erected a shrine to Mary. When you saw a crowd of people all pushing and shouting (hence the name) to get inside a certain location, you knew you’d encountered a good one. You arrived to the house and began pushing and shoving until you were able to squeeze your way in the front door. Then you stood there for ten or fifteen minutes with the other fifty people who’d pushed their way in, and half heartedly sang songs about Mary. There were normally one or two middle-aged women belting them out, and the rest of the crowd mooching off of their enthusiasm. After patiently waiting and pretending you were interested in singing, you were rewarded with a small amount of candy, an orange, or a small stalk of sugar cane. Upon receiving the prize for your heartfelt songs of adoration, you left the house to look for another, repeating the process. At the end of the night, after hours of pushing and shoving and singing with the other faithful Catholics of the town, you happily returned home with a sack full of candy and oranges and maybe a few small bags of chips. To me, it didn’t feel much like a religious experience, but I did escape without any bruises or broken bones, and fully understood why they called it La Griteria. 

Jinotega, Nicaragua

From Nicaragua we bused to San Salvador. None of us had ever been there before, and didn’t have particularly high expectations for the huge bustling city, but we turned out to be pleasantly surprised. After leaving the hostel our first day in town, we began navigating the ever complicated, but very exciting, urban bus system. We paid twenty cents to ride the bus route 52 for a while, then hopped off at the corner and paid another twenty cents to ride the 42B. I can’t remember the details precisely, but I believe we then changed to the 103A, got off and walked a few blocks, crossed the street,  got on the 33C microbus, very different from the 33C full sized bus, rode it to the intersection with route 13, then took that north to our destination. One way or another, with lots of help from the locals, and a many twenty cent bus fares, we navigated out way to the University of Central America. Here we visited the site of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two women, which took place during the Salvadorian Civil War. We read accounts of each of their lives, their work with the poor and their calls for justice, during a time when speaking out against those in power, the government and the military, was a risky business. Ultimately, on November 16, 1989, they opened their doors to a US-trained, Salvadorian counter-insurgency force, which entered their home and murdered them in. They died for speaking out against injustice, standing up for the poor, and thus, in the eyes of the military, identifying themselves with subversive movements. Later on we visited the home of Oscar Romero, archbishop of El Salvador during the same time period, who was known for speaking out against the ongoing violence and the oppression of the poor. He too was assassinated, in 1980, while celebrating the mass. During his funeral in the cathedral of San Salvador, the military set of bombs and fired shots into the crowd of the tens of thousands who attended. It was very rattling to know that these types of crimes against humanity were going on during our lifetimes, and especially that the US Government was in many ways involved. Those who were in power, fought to maintain it at all costs, regardless of how many innocent lives it required. Visiting these sites were very sacred moments for all of us. Sobering to know of the atrocities, yet for me it was also inspiring, learning of the six Jesuit priests, two women, and Archbishop Romero, whom tirelessly fought for the rights of the poor and the sanctity of life. We too had been living with and working with the poor of Central America, and learning about the stories of these martyrs inspired me to continue to fight for the poor, and for justice, in whatever way that may manifest itself in the future.

The chapel in the Farm of the Child, Guatemala

Leaving El Salvador, we headed to our final stop: Guatemala. For all of us the journey had begun there, spending several weeks in 2012 studying Spanish before heading on to Honduras. And for many of us the journey was going to end there as well. We went because we wanted to see the sight of an orphanage founded in northern Guatemala, by the same couple that founded our orphanage in Honduras. The original Guatemalan orphanage was begun in the 1980s, and after building it and running it for many years, the couple moved to Honduras to begin another, which would become the Farm of the Child as we know it today. Unfortunately the original Farm of the Child in Guatemala didn’t last long after the founders left, the children were relocated to other homes, and now the site is only ruins. While planning this trip, we talked to the founder, and she told us that no one had visited the site in over ten years, and that there was probably very little remaining. Many more phone calls later we got in touch with a man who said he would take us to the original site and show us around. So from Guatemala City, we got on a night bus, and more or less 15 hours later, arrived in El Naranjo, Guatemala, a city well known for… absolutely nothing. It is close to the Mexican border, so it is a good stop off point for all immigrants heading north, but other than that all the town has is a big river and a lot of cattle. In fact it didn’t even have electricity until it was just recently installed this past November. Our soon to be friend, Victor, a former teacher at the orphanage’s school, met us when we arrived, and took us to the hotel where we would stay. Immediately he began telling us one story after another of the old Farm, one of his favorites being about Pablo, the resident howler monkey who lived in the trees and was constantly harassing the kids. If one of the children attending the school wasn’t playing close attention, he would steal their backpack and carry it up the tree to inspect it for anything he was interested in. He kept what he wanted, and threw the rest back down. He would even steal the babies’ bottles of milk, carry them up the tree, then upon drinking the milk, hurl the empty bottle to the ground. For years it seemed like the children had a love-hate relationship with Pablo, until one day, the German man who directing the orphanage at that time, sent all the kids into town to buy some ice cream. While they were gone, he got out his trusty rifle and ended the Pablo’s mischief once and for all. When the kids began to ask where Pablo went, he replied that he must be off in the forest somewhere playing with his friends. Finally Victor finished with his favorite story of all. The story of how he married one of the English volunteers, who is still his wife today and with whom he has a fifteen year old son. Obviously Victor could never forget the Farm. The next day he put us on a boat, and took us on the short trip down the river to the site of the Guatemalan Farm of the Child. The only buildings really left standing were the chapel and a few chicken coops, but the concrete foundations were all still there, and we were able to vividly imagine the stories Victor explained. Kids making loops on rollerblades in the one room schoolhouse, the female caretaker who they always tried to keep from going to town because she frequently ended up pregnant afterwards, and Vicente, the founder, taking off in his Cessna on the dirt runway, bringing someone to the nearest hospital hours away. Getting to know the original Farm of the Child, and hearing Victor’s endless stories, was a dream for us, and a very fitting way to end our journey.

My three years at the Farm of the Child in Honduras was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. It involved some of the lowest lows, and some of the highest highs, and because of that it urged me to learn and grow in ways I never would have imagined. I encountered a dark side of humanity I’d never known much of before, in the suffering of the children and the struggles they deal with daily through no fault of their own. But I also encountered a force and a resilience I’d seldom seen before, in the way they respond to their demons, and the way the volunteers and employees of the Farm fight their battles with them. And finally I found a real beauty in the landscape and lifestyle of rural Central America, and in the unlikely relationships formed between abandoned children, Honduran adults, and American idealistic volunteers. Those three years were far from easy, but for that I’m very grateful, because it allowed me to learn what I have, and grow into the person I’ve become. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be there, to God, and to each and every one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to meet over the past three years. And I pray that the things I’ve learned and the ways I’ve grown continue on with me as I move forward with life.

Group of Farm boys along with neighbor boys after a 3-1           The fear-inspiring, mustache-wearing Farm male volunteers

And for all of you who’ve lost countless hours of your life reading these far-too-lengthy blog posts, thanks I guess. I enjoyed writing them, so I hope ya'll enjoyed reading them.