Saturday afternoon from the other side of Nueva Suyapa

It’s finally a sunny afternoon and I find myself on a porch, experiencing the new responses to the change in weather from a different angle. It’s burning season here, meaning large amounts of foliage, leaves and garbage meet this chemical miracle we call fire to color the city-side, and lungs, with a fuming tint of gray. Mountains are still boundarying the city as they always have before, only a little wavery; visibility affected. On this one, human’s manufacturings interrupt creation’s disordered beauty in sounds and pieces. Trash hidden inside thistle bushes, cricket’s chirping blared over by radio triumphants and once lightly bushed hillsides now dirted and housed are some results. Mostly small, brilliantly colored butterflies flit past, riding the wind; which gently tosses oddly placed banana trees, longer types of grass and evenly littered bush branches. The more common black and white birds and less common miniature ones also go along for a glide, stopping to bask in aluminum reflected heat. Girls and their counterparts walk along this dust with buckets full of water and symmetrically arranged tortilla lined baskets. Some run, hands free, engaging play. Off in the distance, all of these things are happening just the same in greater volume. The sun begins to rest, turning a sky altering yellow-to-orange, tips forcing fuchsia, all pasteled by the ongoing types of smoke. The mountains now merge with clouds, appearing a mere shadow, both dually outlined by lite bright pink. The rowsuponrows of houses seem as they are just beginning to wake up, providing vigils of light pathways along the mountainside, valleys and in between that have come to define this city we call Tegucigalpa.

Bus trip efg's

To sum up, Papa’s shed, when it was finished, was three-quarters of a large, malodorous wooden box without heat, without paint, without charm, and without ostensible purpose. Which is why I felt forced, the first time I stood in it alone after dark, to conclude that what I’d taken to be Papa’s new lease on life might in fact have been a quiet but complete loss of sanity. The odd thing was, this notion didn’t much bother me. Having spent half my time studying the things that schoolteachers, church preachers and paper mill and aluminum plant owners considered “sane,” I figured Papa’s sanity couldn’t do us any more harm than everyone else’s sanity was already doing. ~ David James Duncan ~ The Brother’s K ~ p.106.


I load the bus, like many others like many times before. One of my accompanees is a young boy that appears to me about five wearing a blank shirt and uniformed looking khaki pants. School's been back in session for some weeks now, so it may be a new and exciting kindergarten that this boy’s garb is representing. He is determined to make the most out of this after-school bus-trip in a school bus, full of adults going to the market to work, not learn; who have mostly just graduated from sixth grade, and cannot do the reading or writing that he will soon have the opportunity to learn. So, in order to fulfill this purpose, shoulders hunched, lips wavering, eyebrows raised, he asks and is granted the honored cockpit seat right next to the bus driver and his whole control panel. In one full ask, this boy has now been given the best window seat in the bus; a three foot full frontal view of motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, women carrying baskets of maize on their heads, and dogs, the constant but momentary obstacles dodging and sometimes creating all this that they have come to know as traffic. It all passes by for the boy like the video game he once played, where crashing into fire hydrants and running into police barricades were his usual game ending events. But, this was even cooler, because it was real life and this idealized bus driver was weaving in and out of similar road teasers; managing this long vehicle full of passengers with ease. When the bus driver was not looking, which was most of the time, this boy would pretend the large steering wheel was in fact in front of him, and he had left his life of smashing into fire hydrants and walked into that of stopping, turning and speeding up at just the right moment to get to the market as fast as he can while picking up every passenger he possibly can.

The bus driver closes the open window, his one safety precaution for his new sidekick. He then presses his finger gingerly on the boy’s stomach, possibly telling one or two more safety tips, explaining a little shop, or hearkening good behavior. My best guess is the latter. From then on, the bus driver returned to bus driver world. This particular bus driver’s head is about one inch higher and sometimes ventures below this very steering wheel the boy imagined he was using. His eyes seem much farther down, indicating either a lack of thought altogether, or an over consumed state of fantasized thought; a switch he seemed to turn off and on during unamused uneventful periods of driving. The very images that sent surges through this little boy’s excitement center seemed altogether expected and regular for this bus driver. Even the occasional close call had already been rerun. Every now and then, this bus driver would participate in these unnecessary forms of communication with the cobradors, descriptions about the height and weight and other keep-out body parts of subsequent women on the bus, passing by, and of those they’d something’d in lower forms of language would often subdue.

The boy didn’t understand such language yet,though it slowly would seep into his conscience and word by word change the way he viewed women. Luckily, at this point, it didn’t yet matter, he too was in his own bus driver world. Where a high school drop-out drinking on or before and after the weekends was a hero, the dogs and taxi drivers were villains and this five year old had just the right idea to make it all work out.

At least he got one of the three right, we’ll hope he hasn’t unlearned it by the time he’s old enough to impact it.

Another Year

Things are speeding up here in Honduras; hence my lack of blog writing; my creative activities more on loan to work predicaments such as trying to find a way to get the informations guy here to give me a list of the clients so I can keep doing the survey I was assigned to do, but in the end the solution is less creative and more like first grade, tell the big-boss to get him to do it; others are connecting biblical principals to being a loan officer for weekly meetings with loan officers, not that hard I have discovered, as the job seems comparable to many jobs and situations that occurred in biblical times, such as being a shepherd or the parable of the talents ---biblical style micro-finance at its best. Another would be how to write a run-on sentence such as those I am encountering in the “Alquimista” by Paulo Coelo, oh look, I just did it.

Due to all these somewhat strange creative experiences I have been able to discover in Nueva Suyapa, and being offered a continued position here, I have decided to stay another year. I will continue to work with the Microfinance program; excited to pursue some of the many ideas Yoni, the boss of the microfinance program and I birthed after our two week infiltration of micro-finance at the Boulder Institute of Micro-Finance in Costa Rica, thanks to some string pulling by my dad, who works for the Institute. At which I was able to learn cool new economic Spanish terms that I didn’t always understand in English, like Rentabilidad – (covering your costs…ok I know what that means) and Cartera – Microfinance Portfolio (the Spanish of which I knew months before the English); and equations that ran on like my sentence, these classes with such equations brought me back to college math and economics classes in which I was also lost. At first I just tried to listen and stop my mind running during, as I do in my meditation efforts in the morning, and in the end gave up and started physically running and actually getting lost. What I got out of that particular presentation though, was that Bolivia is amazing at microfinance and due to its stellar performance was able to withstand an economic crash in the country: so, be aware and be like Bolivia during our worldwide economic crash.

Other sat through classes better understood were how to amp up the meetings with clients and provide lessons and training in health, self esteem, women’s empowerment, business management and financial literacy; how to run a more productive program; how to reach the poorest of the poor while still making money and a lot about tariffs and interests, oh wait, I didn’t understand that either, and yes, the class was in English, translated into Spanish.

My father was able to come and teach other terms to expectant loan officers such as Viabilidad – or easy – viability – which in English means making money. But, lesson learned, as when I was with a fellow loan officer friend at the business of her sister in law, she commented, “See, this business is viable.” Commenting on the apparent cash – flow, something she also learned in the class that was easliy floating through this business. In addition to teaching necessary tidbits to facilitators such as how to run effective meetings and prevent “morosidad” which is a cool Spanish term for having debt; it was just good to have him here and introduce him to my friends and community. Which he felt so comfortable in, that he decided to throw a surprise party for me, going out with a bang --- a Dora pinata to be exact, which apparently looked like me. Since he and I and you and me and the entire world are apparently connected on facebook, you are free to view these schannanigans on facebook, free of charge, only giving your internet soul to the multi-millionare social genuises who created the gimmick.

In response to all of this learning some things we have decided to focus on here at MCM, aka Genesis, are: continuing to implement training and incentives for facilitators and clients on issues such as described above; looking into and possibly implementing insurance and savings programs—by linking up to bigger MFI’s (Microfinance Institutions) who offer such programs to smaller MFI’s; starting up a program specifically for the poorest of the poor of Nueva Suyapa, giving small loans of around $50 and providing more intensive training in empowerment and financial literacy; and finally --- finishing the dragged out survey that I am conducting on the clients of the program.

All that to say: I am enjoying myself here, finding a lot of good work to do, and plan on doing it for at least another year. I also plan on posting another creative writing attempt soon. Thank you for reading.