In the first few weeks in January, I spent 10 days in Honduras with Chencho Alas, the Exec. Dir. of the Mesoamerican Foundation for Peace and his youth coordinator, Yeny Nolasco. I was there to observe how the Foundation worked and trainings intended to help individuals imagine and plan a new future for their communities.
As I was traveling through Honduras, there were various moments when I felt something shift. And then there was the day when I came home and just wrote... what I saw, what I felt, what I heard and what I didn't understand... knowing one day it would be critically important to remember that moment when my perspective irrevocably shifted. It was the day we visited Río Blanco - an indigenous community seeking to protect its land against a Chinese mining company. I have copied this entry below... (see my last entry for related photos).
If you would like to learn more about the Chinese mining project in Río Blanco, here are some good articles to start:
Testimony from a human rights delegation in July, 2013
Article about the World Bank's Involvement and Murders w/in the Community
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| Father Neri, my host brothers and me in Santa Barbara |
Friday January 10th
Our 3rd day in Honduras.
Our third day surrounded by fuerza, by strength, by passion, by more suffering
turned into positive lessons of Fortaleza, unidad, and endurance rather than an
endless string of reasons to blame God for a bad deck, which no one in the
world could fault them for. My third day of being inspired by Yeny’s (the
Foundation’s youth director… also my peer and roommate for the trip) ability to
express love towards everyone around her, especially herself. To wear makeup and
be sexy, feminine, and allow those things to contribute to, not negate, her
power.
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| Yeny, German and I eating lunch in Río Blanco |
Today is
that day where you realize days, months, years later exactly what you saw. We
were invited by an indigenous community to visit their lands high in the
Honduran mountains near the country’s newest hydroelectric dam where a Chinese
mining company is currently undergoing construction to take over. Police
greeted us at odd checkpoints, and when we arrived, I heard stories of people
threatened or killed, of orphaned children being taken care of by their
grandmothers in skirts and brightly colored shirts donated from the United
States (one man sported a large KENTUCKY shirt underneath his sullied white
cowboy hat).
And then
there’s Anazibet. She is 13. As we walked the long path from the community to
the river below (the crystalline river, cold and fresh, that will be filled
with sediment and contaminants if the mine’s construction continues, with
vigilantes andpolicemen watching us from high above on the opposite bank), she
stood 3ft shorter than I, and spoke of school, of her dreams for the community.
She walked me through the situation with the policemen, the lucha (fight) in her community, not a
lucha for the adults mind you. A lucha for everyone. She told me how the police
come, armed, trying to pass, and she and her peers don’t let them. It was as if
we were talking about the weather, what she planned to wear to school the next
day.
One chico
took my camera and went absolutely nuts. He was fascinated by the buttons, the
rapidity with which he could take these images of people who surround him all
day and transform them into single, still images on a LCD screen. I understood
everyone! I was welcomed, I spoke aloud and introduced myself in projected
Espanol. I shared a meal of tortillas, beans, and rice with the kids
surrounding me. And as I held out a bag to collect little candy wrappers,
suddenly there was a small army of mini luchaderos and luchaderas (fighters)
running around the hill, weaving in between their parents, tias and tios,
grandparents, to come back and valiantly throw down their collected garbage
into the bag. And I thought to myself, this is the generation that will
construct a life in concert with the madre tierra, not against or in spite of
it. How did we stray so far?
I have
wondered these past months how the side of justice, patience, respect, and
community can possibly win against those with money, arms, and most
importantly, the willingness to use these resources at the expense of others. Does
that not put us at an irreversible and critical disadvantage? But as we gathered
last night in the offices of Mayor Carmen, the victorious LIBRE candidate in
San Nicolas, and the people began to recount their most profound, emotional and
rewarding moments in their experience of the campaign up until this moment of
both loss and victory, I realized that the expressed feelings of love, unity,
hospitality, endurance… of deeply felt community and spiritual transformation
toward an unspoken but mutually understood dream of a future reality in which
kids are free to wander the streets and pursue their dreams and health free
from violence, corruption and inequality… that cannot possibly come from
self-interest... That is the world we are striving for – a world permeated
with love and peace, grounded in a fundamental respect for one’s neighbor no
matter his or her creed, religion, or socioeconomic standing. Our actions are
given by our morals, and as we continue even in the face of what may seem to be
outstanding defeat, our very endurance predicts our eventual victory.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
MLK
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