Angie Miner

August-September. I am continuing to work closely with the bakery group. They are an awesome group of hard workers but motivation is falling as the business continues to struggle for profits. I reassure them that this is common for most new small businesses because we are still establishing our market and products, but it is understandably difficult for them when they work all day but have virtually nothing to bring home to support their families. Times are hard. I suspect that many have only stuck it through this long because there really aren’t any other employment opportunities available. They tell me 5 dollars a day would be an acceptable wage for them but they are struggling to earn 1 dollar a day each from the net profits after ingredient costs and loan payments have been taken out.

I began working with another volunteer who lives in the city and we found another market we can sell to. There is a youth center which provides food for kids and they decided they like the bread enough to buy it regularly for the kids and to sell to the families. We are now taking that a step further and are organizing a group of 8 youths who we will teach to start their own business. They will sell the bread in their neighborhoods and to their local stores and will in turn earn a profit and valuable skills for their future careers. School dropout rates and delinquency is high so creating opportunities for youth to engage in their learning and skills development is important and to help them earn money while they do it is excellent. I am also establishing a contact with an organization that supports small businesses run by women. They run a small store that sell products the women make and I am hoping to set up a connection between them and my bakery group.

With the prospect of increased demand, the bakery is realizing that it is needing to upgrade. Up until now everything has been made by hand and baked in a large firewood oven. This method is very time consuming and physically straining for a lot of the older women in this group. We have found a large electric mixer that is used to mix bread dough. It is second hand and the vender says he will sell it for about $750. This is a good price but it is still a lot of money for the group to invest, especially since they already have a large loan they are still paying off. The vendor says he will loan us the mixer for 2 months as a trial period, which we are going to do, and then we have to come up with the money to pay for it. The mixer will not only ease the work load of the bakers but also increase daily production, improve the consistency and quality of the batches, and allow them to make a larger variety of bread that is often more difficult to make by hand. Unfortunately funding has been difficult to find and they are worried about how they will be able to buy the mixer. We are also hoping to someday buy an electric oven because it is cheaper to use (firewood is expensive), more environmentally friendly (firewood promotes deforestation in the area), and cooks the bread more consistently at a set temperature (firewood ovens can be hotter or cooler at any given time and may overcook or undercook the bread). But that is of somewhat lower priority for us behind the mixer.

In the months following the military coup, Honduras continues to struggle to reestablish political stability. The ex-president has not been allowed to return to the country on threats of arrest and imprisonment. He attempted to land once in an airplane but was unable to when the military blocked the landing strip at the airport. He set up camp in Nicaragua outside the Honduran border and called his supporters to him. He made a highly publicized move to cross into Honduras surrounded by his supporters but only remained for about 20 minutes before returning to Nicaragua. Throughout this time, much of the international community has labeled the military coup illegal, citing that there were more legal ways of dealing with this situation than kidnapping and ousting the president. The international community calls for the reinstatement of the Ex President Manuel Zelaya as the legitimate president and has continued to hold thus far unsuccessful negotiations between the two political parties in hopes of fixing the political standoff. Many countries have stated that they will not recognize the newly elected government officials from the upcoming November elections if the elections are held under the current Roberto Micheletti Presidency.

The everyday life here in Honduras during these times remains as normal as it can be in a time like this. However, that is not to say that we are not feeling the effects of the political situation. Most international funding and aid to Honduras has been suspended until negotiations come to an acceptable agreement. That means that many organizations have suspended work and that funding for projects and improvements of communities has also stopped. This has affected my work here as well because the work I have been doing with several organizations and the funding I need to do a planned community improvement project has been suspended. The Honduran economy is also taking a hit from the US economic depression as the vast majority of Honduran exports goes to the US markets. Falling demand has caused several factories to shut down and many Hondurans have lost their jobs and struggle to support their families. Teacher strikes have also been abundant during these months and many students have lost several weeks of classes to the situation. The school in my community, however, has been lucky enough to have a dedicated group of teachers who for the most part have not participated in the strikes and have continued to teach classes. Roadblocks and the occasional protest or rally also continue to occur but with diminishing interest. People are now focused on the upcoming elections and are wondering if even a newly elected government will be enough to put the political upheaval behind them and calm the pressures of the international community.

July- After returning from vacations I went straight to work with a group of women who work to raise awareness about domestic violence and women’s health issues. We organized an information fair event where we had doctors, nurses, women from several communities, and other Peace Corps volunteers come in and present various topics that included HIV/AIDS, diabetes, dental care, family planning, nutrition, home exercises, domestic violence, and trash management, among other things. We offered free pap smears and syphilis tests to help draw in the crowds. The event turned out decently enough for being staged in a small community. We had a good attendance, though the pap smears were definitely and unbelievably the hit of the show.

After that I refocused my attention on the bakery, which was having the same difficulties that most new small businesses often experience: poor organization, costs that are too high, profits that are too low, and a market that is too small. The group had taken out a loan to pay for a lot of the initial start-up costs of the business and was worrying about the feasibility of paying it off. We sat down and did some serious accounting and found out which of our products generated the most income (the good old classic white bread and sweet bread) and which ones we actually were losing money on (sorry cookies and torts but you gotta go). We experimented with the product sizes and quality to see if we could create a menu people would buy from but that would still generate a decent profit margin. However we continue to face difficulties. Money is tight during this season in the community since there are no harvests and bread is a luxury many people must forgo so they can buy corn, beans, and vegetables. Also our competition is bread from the city which is often a couple days old before it reaches the community and is usually drier and harder but slightly more profitable for the local store owners to sell. Our bread is softer and has a different flavor which some people prefer and others do not (I love it!). We have thus far been unable to carve out a large enough market here in the community to make our business sustainable. The workers often leave after a 10 hour day of working with maybe a dollar in their pocket…if even. Sales must be increased for their profits to rise…

End of June- So three days after the bakery decided to open I was scheduled to leave for the States on vacation to spend some time with my friends and family. I was a little bit worried about the group because starting a small business is difficult and I didn’t want to abandon them during their first two weeks of working. I suddenly became further concerned when the day before I was to leave on the plane (the morning that an apparently illegal survey by the president was supposed to take place to see how the Honduran people felt about a Constitutional change), there was a military coup and the armed forces kidnapped the President of Honduras and threw him out of the country! I was shocked! And so was the country. Bus lines shut down (the main means of transportation for most Hondurans and Peace Corps volunteers), protests for and against the president took place, tire-burning road blocks sprang up all over, the power in several major cities was cut off, and many news channels were censored. I was lucky that the next day I was still able to catch a bus to the capital city airport and fly out as scheduled. Despite all the chaos, the country remained in a state of non-violence and no deaths were reported during the initial days following. A new stand-in president was inaugurated to hold the position until the up-coming elections in November. When I returned to the country 2 weeks later, things had settled down a bit. Roadblocks and protests where still persistent and the country continued to be divided in its support between the ejected ex-President Manuel Zelaya and the newly inaugurated President Roberto Micheletti. However, the country remained remarkably more or less non-violent and the day-to-day lives of most people continued as normal.

For more news on the Military Coup in Honduras check out www.MiamiHerald.com and lookup Honduras.

Since mid-June I have been working with a group of women and youths on a small business project. The women are all mostly single mothers with very little means of income to support their families and the youths are teenage boys and girls building their skill levels and work experience for future careers. Within this community there are very few employment opportunities and stable year long jobs can only be found in the city. Most people here make their income harvesting melons and sugar cane during the harvest months and working random jobs or selling fruits and corn from their own fields. Men are usually the ones to earn the income while the women stay at home to care for the family and household. This small business that I am working with here in the community is an attempt to work with women and youth demographics to offer them experience and income generation opportunities and a chance to participate more actively in the community. This business will also hopefully provide an additional employment source within the community and will serve to train youths in business skills.

The group consists of 10 people and they decided they would like to create a bakery. Bread is commonly eaten here not in loaf form but as individual rolls of various flavors and is usually eaten with coffee. I was extremely fortunate to come in contact with a man who works for the Red Lion company and specializes in training groups to start bakeries. He came to our community and did a training workshop with the group for 4 days and taught them how to make various kinds of bread and market them. He even brought in the basic ingredients of flour, sugar, oil, yeast, etc which the group was able to use throughout training and during their first few days of work. He did all of this for free! On the last day we held our grand opening event and invited local store owners and community members over to come and try our bread. This came as a slight surprise for me as I was not expecting the bakery to officially open for another few weeks while the group finished preparations and I went on a planned vacation, but things have a way of suddenly happening and plans change on the turn of a dime. Thus we became a business. The bread is all local and hand made and baked in a firewood oven, and it is delicious (fresh out of the oven is to die for)! We plan to sell the bread to individuals and store owners in the community and several of the surrounding communities. Bags of 12 pieces of bread sell for about 55 cents. Cheap huh! But that’s a good average here. We even offer free delivery, via runners, the same day the bread is made. What a deal!

May- The grounds shook, roofs rattled, and structures trembled as a 7.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Northern Honduras and shivered through the country. Along the northern coast, houses fell and people stumbled out onto the streets in groggy confusion. It was after midnight. In the southern zone the effect was buffered and structural damage was minimal. I, in my house, attested to the quality of the Soñadora Plus brand mattresses as I slept soundly without stirring during the first real earthquake I have experienced in my life. When I awoke I was told there had been an earthquake caused by a meteor that hit the ocean off the coast of Honduras. The earthquake was true but I never figured out a meteor managed to weave itself into the story; a fabrication that originated and stayed within my community as friends outside laughed at my gullibility.

When you were just a child, what did you dream of?  Do you remember how you saw the world?  Do you still carry the memory of how you envisioned yourself?  What career held your passion when you were still so young and the whole world was possible.  What image pressed your mind when the words “to be” raced through your ears for the future path you could choose?  What sparked that happy smile when you thought of an ending to the phrase “I am ______”?  Perhaps you pictured yourself as a doctor, an astronaut, a fireman, or a policeman.  Maybe you wanted to paint beautiful pictures, explore the wonders of the world, protect your country, or find cures to deadly diseases.  Whatever passion it was that called your heart, do you remember why?  What was it about this particular path in life that made you so dearly desire it?  This aspect of what you could give or gain, could it be fulfilled by your dreamed-of life?  Did you want to help people, be famous, or just live your life as wild and free as possible?  Do you remember who you idolized as a child?  What person or figure led a life that you found fascinating?   Which aspects of this life were the ones that so entranced your mind and spurred the beat of your heart? 

Do you remember this path your heart desired as a child?  Do you follow it today or still yearn for it deep in some repressed area of your soul?  Where did life take you?  Perhaps as your mind grew, pieces of the outside world fell upon you to break your dreams with the sickle words of ‘impossible’, ‘unrealistic’, and ‘impractical’.  Then during the years of confusion and eminent choosing, you decided whether these words would break you with their clouded foreshadowing, or build you as you pitted yourself against their pessimistic taunts to test the strength of your own resolve.  You see the twists and turns of the path your feet have made and here you stand at a result of it all, for better or for worse.  

As you take in the surroundings of where you are, of who you are, what do you see?  Did you become the person you had wanted to be?  Are you now a person you want to be?  If the ever so imminent death was standing at your door, ready to knock and call you away this very night, could you leave with satisfaction knowing that you lived in the best way that you could?  Could you be happy knowing that you have been given the gift of a life that lasted for all the years that you have walked this earth, with the opportunity to impact in some great or small way everything that you touched?  Did you learn what is truly important in life?  Do you feel the richness of love, the happiness in unconditional friendships, the purpose in belief, the wonder of the natural world, the joy of giving, and the rightness of doing what is just?  Have you yet discovered the emptiness of money, the curse of materialism, the ache of greed, and the pain of hatred?  Are you satisfied with the way you spent your fleeting and fragile life?  Or, when you open that door and find that you stand at the end of your existence, will you fall to your knees and cry out in grief as you realize that your opportunity has passed and you have wasted it all.  Will you accept with humbleness that you can live no more to do and change and be upon this earth, or will you plead and beg for just a little more time to go back and set things right, perhaps to live for just a few short days as the person you always promised yourself you would be. 

But perhaps luck is still with you and on this night death chooses to pass by your door to knock upon another.  Maybe your time to live in this world will continue for another day, a week, a year, several decades, there’s really no way to know.  But this moment you do know.  This time now you do have and every second of your life is a choice.  What will you do and say in these every seconds to come?  Have you truly yet lived or are you still waiting for some distant day to awaken from the coma of the everyday life you still dwell in.  This is your life, are you who you want to be? 

Strolling on a path one day I began to climb a hill to a house.  A strange sound sighed through the air and wandered into my ears.  It was like a low whistling of the wind vibrating through the air.  A crooning that inflated and died like the gusts of a playful breeze.  Cresting the hill I suddenly realize its instrument.  A few youths had happened upon an old cassette tape.  They had pulled out the liquidy black ribbon of tape and strewn it across a yard.  It ran from tree to post to rock to tree until it resembled a vast midnight web of a spider.  The children were laughing and running amongst the glistening lines, tightening some areas and loosening others.

I asked what they were doing.  Nothing, they told me.  We are just playing. 

Playing.  I understood.  It was more than just simple play, they were creating.  What they had done was harnessed the voice of the wind.  Like an orchestra of strings.  The breezes, strong and weak, slid, twisted, and pulled at the ribbons of tape.  The friction emitted low sounds of whistles and moans carried by the breeze.  A wind instrument in the truest sense of the word.  Something beautiful.  The music flowed and changed with every mood of the wind and adjustment of the lines.  Standing in the middle felt like a dream.  Black waves glistened and danced in an ocean of shade and light.  Close your eyes, the music was there all around you.  I could feel it as it tickled my skin and vibrated through my ears.  The wind was joyful.  The youths then picked up dead branches with leaves and began shaking them in the air and scraping them along the ground.  They whistled through their teeth and flapped plastic bags in the wind.  A concert complete with a variety of instruments.  Their laughter only added to the atmosphere.

After a while the children began to disassemble the lines.  They took them down one by one and let go of their branches and plastic bags.

We want to play soccer now, they tell me.  Soccer it is then little children.  Go and play and enjoy the diverse richness that is this world.

School.  It runs from 8am to 1pm during the weekdays.  In between breaks children receive about 4 to 4½ hours of classes everyday, as long as there is not a holiday, teacher strike, or other meeting or event to cut the day short or cancel it altogether.  The high school graduation rate is low.  Students drop out all the time for reasons of work, economic hardships, or simply because they decide they do not like school and their parents don’t encourage them much to continue.  Toward the end of the year there usually forms a tutoring group of a couple of volunteers who want to help children who are struggling in school so they can pass the grade.  These volunteers generally are composed of a few older students and perhaps a concerned mother or two.  I decided to tag along to a couple of tutoring sessions to help out some of the kids. 

Within the schools memorization is the most common learning tool.  Students are asked to memorize facts and numbers so they can repeat them on the tests.  Ensuring the understanding of the reasoning behind the concepts is sometimes neglected.  At the tutoring session the children each had workbooks.  The object of the session was to help them each fill out their workbooks.  I watched the tutors for a little bit helping out the younger students.  For a question that asked a student to come up with sentences describing a passage they had read the tutor would say or write out the sentences on a separate sheet of paper and have the students copy it into their workbook. For a mathematics problem they would refer to the multiplication or addition charts and show the students how to look for the correct numbers on the chart to find the correct answer.

I was not particularly fond of these approaches and decided to move in and help a young child who seemed to be having difficulties.  I explained his first assignment.  He needed to copy a word that was written at the top of the page five times on the lines below.  He took his time and copied each of the letters down and did a good job.  Next I asked him to read the word he wrote.  He stared down at his hands and refused to speak.  Perhaps he was shy.  The next page was math- multiplication.  Not wanting to rely on the charts I attempted to encourage him to figure out the answer to a simple multiplication problem.  3×4= what? Say there are 4 people and each person has 3 apples.  How many apples are there in all?  Blank stare.  Let’s count.  The first person has 3 apples, so that’s 3.  The second person also has 3 apples.  What is 3+3?  He gives me an annoyed look.  Finger counting.  7? No, let’s try again.  I count with him.  6.  I guide him through every step of the problem.  The answer is 12.  Write the number 12 here.  Nothing.  Twelve, it’s a 1 and a 2 together.  Like this. 1…2….12.  Okay next one.  He is getting annoyed, I feel like he is not really ready for multiplication as he is still struggling with addition.  But we have to move on.  I decide to use the multiplication chart.  I do not like this method, but time is not our friend.  I show him how to match the numbers to the chart to find the one that is missing.  I must show him for every number. 

The next page is sentences.  He must come up with four sentences and write them down.  I ask him what he would like to write and he just looks at me expectantly.  I ask him what his favorite food is and he tells me it is fruit.  Write something about that.  What should I write?  He is frustrated that I don’t just tell him.  I give in for the first one, an example I tell myself.  How about “Fruit is my favorite food.”  He nods. 

Okay write that down on the first line.    He is frustrated and wants me to write it out so he can copy it.

You can do this, just start with the first word, write “Fruit”.

The pencil is poised, the stare is blank.

Do you know what letter ‘fruit’ starts with? It starts with the letter “F”.

Nothing.

Do you remember what the letter F looks like?  Like this.  I point to an F in a word on the page. 

He write the letter F.

Okay now the second letter is ‘r’. 

Nothing.

I then realize why he is so frustrated with me.  He doesn’t know the letters or numbers.  They are merely symbols on a page that he is asked to copy.  How can he be expected to write a sentence if he doesn’t know what the symbols mean on a page.  Just get him to fill out the workbook they tell me.  That’s all he needs to do.  Is that really so much to ask?

Nature, the environment.  It is all around us, twisted and entwined in every aspect of our lives.  It is the wind blowing through the trees and tickling your skin with a fresh cool breeze.  It is the soil, soft and moist, and brimming with a thousand lives beneath your feet.  It trickles down from above to spur new growth and quench scorched tongues.  It beams through canopies of leaves and filters through curtained windows to warm away the coldness of the night.  It soars through the sky, lopes across the earth, and splashes through the rivers.  It brings life and death to every creature that draws breath, to every cell that ever claimed to live.  It is gentle and dangerous, nurturing and unforgiving, powerful and the very essence and component of all that is alive and not.

It cannot be broken, cannot be tamed or domesticated.  It is wild.  It is free.  You can plant a seed in a pot but you cannot tell it how to grow.  Its branches will reach out for their own destinies and its flowers will grow to their own individual splendor.  A dog, though trained into submission, will not bow to your every request.  Its mind will follow its own path; its paws will bound to a beat only it can hear.  You can do what you like with nature, cut it down, dam it up, pave it over, hunt it out, modify its genes, pollute it, monoculture it, cage it, or whatever else may suit your fancy but it will never be yours.  It will never swoon to your every whim nor follow the path you so meticulously carve.  It will rebel.  You cannot know every secret and power that it possesses because it is like a complex creature, alive with breath and composed of a billion beings each with their own part to play, and whose story changes with every tread of a foot.

You can fool yourself into believing that it is only a necessity of an uncivilized world, a thing that can be replaced with modernized technologies and human intellect.  But you would be blind.  What is technology without power.  Where is power without the sun, the wind, the water, and the existence of a million organisms now and forever past.   What is a human without food grown from the earth, fed by the countless organisms that make and break the nutrients and materials of the soil.  What is life without the air, recycled by generations of respirating leaves covering the landscape, and the water, rejuvenated by the vast network of ever seeking roots.   What is existence without the companionship and fascination of a million different forms of life so very unlike our own and yet so interconnected with every breath we take.

And so I begin a program of environmental education in the school of my community.  I will teach to these new generations of young people the importance of the natural world around us, the reasons we have to protect that which gives us life, and the things we must do to adapt to the ever growing demands of the changing world around us.  Perhaps some will listen, possibly a few will take interest, and with a little bit luck maybe one or two will develop enough passion to take up a stance and change the world around them for the better throughout the course of their lives.  It only takes a single drop to start a ripple that grows and spreads across the water.  There is only to shake the leaf to which the drop clings before it dries away and disappears.