Politics as Usual

Juana (my neighbor and a member of the latrine committee) and I, recently paid a visit to the municipality to verify whether or not they had decided to fund the latrine project. This is how it went: We arrived at 8:00 am and sat in the mayor’s waiting room for awhile. No one bothered to tell us that the mayor wouldn’t be arriving for another two hours. Meanwhile, I was hit on by the sixty-something year old municipal board member who once told me that my ticket into his swimming pool would be free, with the condition that I wear a string bikini.

We left and came back a little after 10:00 to find the waiting room full, primarily with people waiting to ask the mayor to pay for their most recent medical bill. (It’s literally like case-by-case welfare.) The creepy board member entered and, on his way by, both caressed and squeezed my arm, allowing his hand to linger for a highly inappropriate length of time. A couple of people were attended to before a corpulent pair of television reporters burst in and went straight into the mayor’s office. The mayor proceeded to allow them to conduct an interview. As the reporters left, two more entered and were let into her office in front of everyone else. At this point, Juana called Franklin, the vice-mayor who also happens to have a farm in El Sauce, and told him that we were waiting to see the mayor but couldn’t get in. Soon thereafter we could hear the mayor talking with Franklin on the phone. The door promptly opened and the “people from El Sauce” were asked to come in. Mind you, we were still not actually addressed. The reporters, still in process of interviewing the mayor and various others, had come to inquire about the pressing political issue of the soccer stadium. Apparently, I learned, it is to be renamed after the creepy municipal board member. The mayor was repeatedly interrupted by her cell phone but finally asked us what we had come for while someone else was being interviewed. She answered our inquiry with one sentence before her cell phone rang again.

We were informed that the project will be reviewed on the 29th of July. That’s it. That’s all we wanted to know. I can think of several more efficient ways that this information could have been communicated to us. Before leaving I got in one more question, which was to ask to borrow the projector. She yelled out to her secretary, whose eyes were completely rimmed in shocking electric-blue eyeliner, to check it out to me. We waited for another inordinate amount of time while the secretary typed out the necessary form with two fingers. Just two.

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To raise money for the ecotourism committee we hooked a DVD player and speakers up to a projector, powered them with a car battery and created a temporary movie theater in El Sauce. One little boy called it the gran tele or great T.V.. Only 3 families in El Sauce have televisions and no one has electricity, so it was a popular event. I’m sure that for some of the kids and perhaps even for some of the adults it was really special, something they’ve never done before. The movie selection, however, was a bit odd in my opinion; they chose to play Valdez, an old Burt Lancaster Western dubbed in Spanish. First of all, I’d never heard of Valdez and I certainly never expected to see it in Honduras. Secondly, I expected Burt Lancaster to be Burt Reynolds and was therefore slightly confused for the entire length of the movie.

The big dilemma is that what people really want to see is violence. Quality of is no importance. A movie starring one of the following action stars is preferable: Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Segal, The Rock or Chuck Norris. What these men may not realize is the extent to which they are idolized in Latin America. In an isolated community in the Peruvian Amazon, my friend Michelle snapped a priceless picture of a large mural of Jesus with his arms embracing Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

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The other day I was inside my house when I heard what sounded very much like my scrub brush being scraped along the built-in washboard of my outdoor sink. Alas, I opened my door to find my neighbor, the same one with whom I discussed the merits of my pee bucket, lovingly scrubbing my brush back and forth along the washboard. She wasn’t washing anything. Oh no. She was merely observing the excellent quality of my scrub brush. She wasn’t embarrassed to be caught in the act of admiring a scrub brush but, rather, she continued to caress it while commenting on its remarkable attributes.