In May I went to Honduras to visit family. I loved it. I loved the utter chaos it was to drive on the streets. I loved the fact that food was delicious, served in big portions, and extremely cheap. I loved that I could purchase a nice, cold beer, plantain chips, and walk down the street without anyone hassling me. I loved going to a bar where it smelled literally like death. The people there were class 'A' drunks and I felt at home. But this was the city. This was Tegucigalpa, the capital of one of the most deadly countries in the world. I enjoyed the luxuries of the city for a few days, but then traveled south to the little town of El Cubulero, Valle.
It was a three hour drive that was paved for only the first third of the way. The remaining two-thirds of the way there was composed of a dirt path littered with rocks, bumps, people on bikes, and people walking. The cool refreshing rain that had blanketed Tegucigalpa like a breath of fresh air was now a dry, arid, and amazingly hot oven. The highs of 97 dwindled to a refreshing 85 each night. Just breathing was enough movement to make you break a sweat. God forbid you wear nice clothes to go out dancing.
But despite the heat, El Cubulero is a beautiful place. It is a small town with two schools, a main dirt road, lots of random livestock roaming around, humble people on their porches sipping on bags of frozen water, and military police hanging out at the only outdoor bar, playing pool, while sipping on some chilled beers. It was there where I realized how lucky I have it here in the U.S.
To begin with, there is no stable electrical grid to supply power to the town. God forbid you plug in too many things in or you would risk overloading the very low-capacity breakers and have the lights go out. Not only that, the electricity goes out randomly due to faulty and shoddy connections or wiring.
When it came to gas, the kind used to heat water and cook with, there wasn't any. The stove was electric. Any open-flame stovetops were fueled by propane or butane canisters which were relatively expensive. Hot water? Non-existent. You had to boil water if you wanted a warm shower (which you never did because God set the thermostat to at least 85 in El Cubulero and then broke the damn thing so it could only get hotter but not colder). If you wanted to cook a lot of food, you had to do some culinary calculus because using the stove top too much could overload the breaker and leave you without electricity. So what do you do? You use your outdoor wood-fueled stove which was just a metal barrel covered in clay with a platform on the side where you would feed in tree branches or any other wood you could find to keep the fire going.
Running water? Barely. The only running water was the sink that was fed by an electrical pump that got water from an underground well. Honduras is actually sitting on top of one of the largest aquifers in Central America. Water is not a scarcity in Honduras, but unfortunately neither is corruption. Anyways, back to my story. Restrooms? You guessed it: outhouses. To flush the toilet you had to fill a bucket full of water and manually flush it. To shower you went outside into a little concrete stall that had an opening where you could get water from a trough (which you had to fill up by an electrical pump every so often that was outside the property) and basically bathe by splashing yourself with scoops of water using a bowl. That trough was the main water source for the home. It was used to wash clothes, wash dishes, for cooking, for flushing the toilet, and for bathing.
I stayed in El Cubulero for five days. I loved every single day I was there. I honestly didn't want to come back. But I was also amazed at how under-developed it was. Honduras is a resource-rich country that exports significant amounts of product to the rest of Central America and the Caribbean. It has huge underground water reserves that allows farmers to grow anything they desire in even the most arid and dry parts of the country. The country has also overhauled its renewable energy infrastructure. About 30 minutes southwest of Tegucigalpa there is a giant wind farm that powers the surrounding smaller towns and is able to also send some energy to the capital.
Despite all the potential, the rampant and unapologetic corruption and selling out to foreign investors has kept many Hondurans literally in the dark. While the president took a private jet to meet with the Danish government, entire neighborhoods in the city of Danli were taken over by MS-13. When the government praises the new international airport Palmerola that's going to be built on a former U.S. military base in Comayagua, military officials literally dug up stacks of money buried in remote places that are linked to the "disappearance" of L 7,000,000,000, $335 million, without any official explanation. When Miguel Facusse, one of the richest men in Honduras, was pontificating about his new land grabs and how they were going to give Honduras a leg up in the biodiesel market thanks to palm oil extracted from the massive palm tree farms he was going to create, his successors feared another uprising and so Berta Caceres was murdered literally days before I went on my trip, and supposedly no one knows what happened.
While the U.S. does have many issues that need to be addressed, we are still very fortunate to live here. The squalor in which some people live in in Honduras is detestable and infuriating. To be poor in the U.S. would mean basic access to running water, reliable electricity, and less military harassment. There are many atrocities and a sea of blood on the hands of those who have been in power in this country, but the standard of living does not even compare.
