Honduras Travels

One morning, after our tortillas and beans, José stood, removed his straw cowboy hat and looked out of the doorway of his earth-floor hut towards the hills.

“I saw the haruca in the forest last night,” he said. I glanced across at his wife, Maria, but she wasn’t smiling. She stayed near to the wood fire on the hearth, rigid and silent. “Walking through the trees,” he added.

I’d never heard the word before, but I could tell it wasn’t good. “Who’s the haruca?” I asked. As usual, he didn’t answer directly. Never give too much away to the gringos, even the friendly ones. They will take it and never bring it back. At last, he said: “It means there will soon be a death in the village.”

During January this year, I lived and worked with an impoverished Lenca Indian family, up in the highlands of western Honduras: José the father, Maria the mother, and their five children, Evelina, Jaime, Benjamin, Alejandro and Hector. Honduras is the poorest country in Latin America. I slept on their floor under blankets. It was very cold. Honduras lies in the tropics, but the Lenca village of Chiligatoro is 6,000ft up, amid pine forests of spectacular beauty. Sometimes, the green fields and brown rolling hills reminded me of Devon.

I got to Chiligatoro by Googling for “volunteer holidays” on the web, which came up with a range of projects from orphanages in Ulan Bator to building work in Honduras. I spoke a bit of holiday Spanish, and knew my Mongolian would never be up to much. So building looked like my best bet.

“Building?” said my girlfriend. “You? You couldn’t even get that bookshelf to stay up.” Honduras it was, then. I clearly had something to prove.

THE BUS from the capital, Tegucigalpa, up to the western highlands boasted a psychedelic paint job, like all Latin American buses, and a girl’s name: Esmerelda. Unfortunately, Esmerelda suffered a series of severe mechanical embarrassments as she wheezed up the precipitous mountain roads, eventually grinding to a complete halt some miles from La Esperanza, so we had to wait to be rescued by the Little Virgin of Suyapa (another bus, not a miracle). From La Esperanza up into the high valleys of the Lenca, we travelled standing in an open cattle truck: a great way to travel for fresh air and a 360- degree view.

I quickly settled in with my gentle, smiling, soft-spoken family. For breakfast, we ate tortillas and beans. For lunch, tortillas and beans. And for supper — you’re ahead of me. On special occasions, I got an egg. I was often hungry, often chilly, always physically exhausted by the evening. It was one of the happiest months of my life.

The Lenca Indians live high in the mountains, as far from the latinos as possible. They grow maize, beans, a few potatoes. They have innumerable beautiful, barefoot children, live in low-slung, thatched, whitewashed cottages, and their climate is often cool, damp and misty. Spending time with them gives you some idea of how rural life in Ireland might have been before the famine: exuberant, communal, Catholic and deeply superstitious.

At dawn we’d trek up into the forest. Hummingbirds flashed in the bright air and waterfalls tumbled down from the high hills. The deep, sun-burnished bracken reminded me of Exmoor in October, or Golden Virginia tobacco. We’d find a glade and start to cut down saplings with the one-and-only machete we had between us. It often went missing. Hector, aged five, was “playing” with it. José just laughed. Then we’d shoulder the saplings in tandem and carry them back to the cottage, a grueling 40 minutes. By now, the sun was climbing straight up into the tropical sky and the mist was steaming off the low valleys. We’d work until 12 and then stop.

At four we could start again. We split the saplings length ways and nailed them to uprights, then dug a trench deep in the rich, red earth, poured in bucketfuls of water from the stream, and the bare-legged children gleefully trampled it into a gloppy quagmire. Then we knelt and scooped up double handfuls of the heavy, wet clay, and slapped them in between the split logs. It was back-breaking work.

And then tortillas and beans, and nightfall. The fire would burn low, the temperature fall dramatically. There was no glass in the windows, no electricity or candlelight, nothing but the brilliant stars. Orion lay on his side at these latitudes, but I’d be too tired to work out why. I’d pull my blankets around me and slump to one side. It might only be 8 or 9pm in the brightly lit cities of the world down below, but here it was time to sleep. I’d be up at 5am tomorrow.

ONE DAY, I asked Evelina, 11, their only daughter, if she got a present for Christmas.

She smiled shyly, looking down at her bare feet in the cold mud. She swung from side to side at the waist, her hands behind her back.

“Well,” she said. “I wanted a new T-shirt, but we haven’t any money to buy clothes. So mama bought us some Doritos.” A big grin, then: “They were lovely!” To buy her children a bag of Doritos for Christmas, this is what Maria must do: she has to go out into the fields and dig up some potatoes. Then she will carry them on her bent back in a cacaxte, a wickerwork basket, for half an hour up the steep winding path out of the valley to the red dirt track. There she will wait, perhaps in the rain, for two, maybe three hours, until she can catch a lift on a passing truck. The driver might charge you 3 lempira (9p) for the ride into town, but he will let Maria travel for free. Half an hour standing in the back of the open cattle-truck, groaning up hills and lurching through potholes, until they reach the little town of La Esperanza.

There Maria will find a place on the pavement amid the other market traders, and she will try to sell her potatoes. On a good day she might make as much as 100 lempira (£3), but usually more like 40 or 50. Then she will be able to go to the supermercado and buy a bag of Doritos for her five children for Christmas. She will spend the rest on a bag of rice, some salt, perhaps some tomatoes. Finally, she might go into the church and pray for the health of her family, and put the last of her coins into the outstretched plaster hand of the statue of the Little Virgin of Suyapa. And then the long, long journey home again.

The children have heard of chocolate, and how delicious it is. Indeed, their Mayan ancestors invented it. But nowadays it all goes abroad, to the rich gringos. They have never tasted it. But still, Doritos — salted maize chips made in Mexico — are a wonderful Christmas present in Chiligatoro.

They were the kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever met. Not once in that month did I hear a voice raised in anger, and the thought of José or Maria slapping their children was inconceivable. The day I left, looking proudly over the new bodega that I’d helped to build, so sad to be going and so longing for home, they smiled their gentle smiles and murmured, “Que te vaya con Dios”. Hector clung to my leg and begged me to take him to England. He knew there was chocolate there. I just laughed and turned away and swallowed.

I wish I could have stayed in touch with them, but there’s no electricity, no telephones, no postal service there. And if I did write a letter, they couldn’t read it. Even the water in Chiligatoro only comes from the stream off the hills, tasting of rocks and pines. So I say to them vayan con Dios. And may the haruca not haunt their woods again.

-Christopher Hart