Stream of Consciousness

“Va a llover” literally translates to, "It's going to rain." It is also, without a doubt, the most commonly spoken phrase in my community. Since it rains all the time, I erroneously took the expression literally and was, for the first two weeks in El Sauce, perplexed by the frequency with which people commented about the impending rain, especially when it was already raining. I was also confused every time the expression was repeated multiple times within the same conversation or when someone randomly said it was going to rain while talking about a completely unrelated topic.

I still don't know what “va a llover” really means, but I finally figured out that it is not referring to rain. My host-mom couldn't really explain what it meant either, but she got a big kick out of the fact that I had interpreted it literally. She attempted to clarify the meaning by saying "va a llover" multiple times in a row. My best guess is that it means something like "whatever" or "yeah right."

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Time is certainly fluid in El Sauce. While conducting household surveys one elderly woman of 76 told me she was 50. Her daughter-in-law corrected her, informing me that her id card placed her at 76, to which the woman stubbornly replied that she thought it must be incorrect because she was most certainly in her fifties. Another woman, age 79, told me that she’d been living in El Sauce for a mere 3 years. Her son just laughed and said, amused, “Three years?! At least forty!”

Another man who was attempting to guess my age said, "You guys are just so big that it's hard to guess your ages." He guessed my age to be around 17.

Sadly, I also misjudged two teenage boys, age 14 and 15, to be around 7 and 9. They come from the poorest family in town and the only explanation for their small size is malnutrition. I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it but it’s just not right.

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I encountered a 10 year-old girl with her own bottle of Boone's Farm which she proudly showed me. She offered a taste as well. Her mom was right there and didn't seem to think anything of it.

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My host-family unabashedly asked me to tell them English slang words for vagina. Under pressure, I only managed to come up with three: cherry, fish taco and axe wound. Unfortunately, I translated them into Spanish.

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By the end of one year here I am predicting that I will have been converted into a devout Catholic or Evangelical either because of the sheer number of prayer services I will have attended or because the crime rate will have convinced me that prayer is our only salvation. It's a pretty close toss-up between the two. My current activities include the Wednesday prayer group, Friday night rosary, and Sunday mass. I’ve also been invited by the evangelicals to attend “the cult” which, while it sounds a little frightening to me, is literally what they call it. So far I’ve managed to avoid “the cult” but I’ve promised to go next Wednesday.

As for the crime rate, it's rather alarming. The murder rate is at about 67 people per 100,000 which is really high. Consider that in Peru it's at 2 per 100,000. Obviously, some of the crime is localized to the bigger cities, especially around San Pedro Sula where there is a lot of gang activity due to the cocaine trade. However, crime extends pretty much throughout the entire country. Guns abound and Hondurans take the law into their own hands because of a non-functional and corrupt legal system. The school director comfortingly put it to me that he could kill me on the spot with my host-sister watching and nothing would happen to him as long as he paid off the lawyers.

The subject arose because two weeks ago at 2:30 on Saturday morning, 4 local men, 2 from my site, were forcefully taken from their homes, shot numerous times in the head and left in a cornfield in a neighboring community. The story goes that men in police uniform came to their homes and claimed they were taking them in for investigation, which was plausible because that actually happened to 9 other people the week before. All of the men who were shot, as well as the men taken into custody the previous week, were members of a local gang who for the last couple of years has been robbing people and delivery trucks and possibly killing.

The bodies were never taken to the morgue and were buried the very next day so you can imagine that any kind of investigation will be rather limited in scope. No one knows who is responsible for the deaths but people refer to them as either the “Death Squad” or the “Gang of the Grey Truck.” Personally, the first name instills a little bit more fear in me than the latter. It is also possible that the police were actually responsible. The lack of legal recourse is, to me, possibly the saddest part of the entire situation. Local people have expressed opinions ranging from sadness and fear to relief. Several people commented to me that they got their just desserts. Clearly, no one wants the threat of a local gang hanging over their heads but I still can't help but thinking that the situation could have been resolved more peacefully. One of the people killed was only 19 and all of them had children.

Two weeks later, some people are still fairly shaken up by what happened. One man told me that he and his four brothers are so concerned that they’ve been sleeping outside for part of every night. I’m not really sure what their logic is but obviously they don’t feel safe. I’m not sure I blame them either given the incompetent, by all appearances, local police force. I recently witnessed them on patrol blaring, “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Nelly – not exactly a confidence booster. At 11:00 PM the other night they went on patrol and blasted off several gunshots at random intervals just to let people know they were patrolling. Not surprisingly, this had the opposite of a calming effect and only served to frighten the people more.