Saving Soles : Remembering my daily life in Honduras

Today I found a shoe repairer next to the entrance of the building Genesis, where I have found myself working for the past year and ten months parked at his new found perch at eight thirty in the morning. A year and ten months, and never have I seen a shoe repairer there. Today just happened to be the day he decided to start something new in this blossoming commercial center we call the bus terminal of Nueva Suyapa. It is hard to know how long he will last; sales are harsh up here, where only the stuck and lazy and those with a certain fascination with localization decide to buy up on the top where it is all more expensive in smaller quantities. But still, members of this commercial center, pertaining of: Doña Martha’s large, pepsi endorsed, where it is hard to find pepsi, taco trailer right in front of the entrance to the Genesis building; a line up of taxis with aggressive and anxious taxi drivers next to it; the cheese man who sells different types of milk products out of the back of a truck out on the corner; Doña Pancha a little to the left of the cheese man, who sells bean tamales, sweet pastelitos and kool aid in a plastic bag; the now booming mini market across the small dirt street that a year ago only sold large quantities of beans and rice; the fruit and vegetable truck in front of this; their competition, which is across from them; Don Paco with his chiclera, fifty yards down from the vegetable truck; Doña Maria right next to Don Paco, who sells baleadas, corn, corn tamales, and if you’re lucky, coffee; have all decided it is worth it to sell near home.

Shoe repairing is not the only trade Ernesto specializes in, as he spent some time in the army, working on cruise ships, doing construction work, trying to sneak into the U.S and various other odd jobs. Having idealized for some time the trade of shoemaker, realizing a shoe repairer was close enough, I begin to inquire of his beginnings.

“This is just my fall back because of the difficult economic and political situation right now, like plan c,” he explains. So this set up, consisting of a wooden table with two drawers filled with shoe repairing gear and a tarp overhead to protect it in this more rain than not season, was the back up to the back up of his trades. I watch as he cuts slits into a little boys school shoe sole, which he follows without pause with string to seal the already glued shoe, providing double protection from the jutting rocks and harsh surfaces Nueva Suyapa is known for. He does this; his studied default, as he talks to me.

“I used to work here about three years ago, I just had a job up in the tourist industry in the North. But with the economy, I had lost my job and needed to find a way to sustain myself.” He moves on to the next step, tapping the shoe with a hammer and placing a wooden block on the inside, pressing on it, to make the glue stick.

“I have had a generally good experience with white people, especially American people.” He places the boy’s now finished product on the ground and moves on to the Honduran women’s all terrain shoe, the high heel. A totally different soccer game, he takes on the challenge with nonchalance.

This simple physical feature that I did nothing to create, my whiteness, inspires openness in him, “I don’t have parents now and didn’t have them growing up, I spent most of my childhood in an orphanage.” He takes out a replacement sole and replacement heel, and begins to cut the new sole to fit the existing shoe. This high heel seemed to have had a particular collision with a considerably large rock.

“It was an American organization, though many of the care taking staff were Hondurans, the people running the organization were from the U.S, and there were many groups that came through pretty often to play with us and stuff. But the person I loved the most, and still love to this day, was the nun who took care of us for a lot of my time there.” The sole for the seemingly beyond hope high heel is now making a comeback.

“She was so beautiful, and I mean her spirit, she wasn’t especially good looking, but that made her seem even more like us common folk, which made her even more likable.” He had applied the glue on both the sole and the heel, and now was doing the block-hammer fusing motion.

“Her Spanish wasn’t that good, she always seemed to stay in the infinitives, but that didn’t matter. She would say, ‘You have naughty, but you not naughty, you wonderful child. Why do that?’ I or the child who disobeyed would try to give some sort of excuse for why we did what many of us children did every day.” He had chosen not to sew this high heel, as it would detract from the style. He instead took out a metal contraption with two metal ends to it that kept together the once separate shoe parts until the glue dried.

“She then would tell us, ‘You better than that. You know I still love you,’ pat us on the back, offer a hug, and sometimes give us candy. I didn’t quite understand why she would give us candy if we were bad, but I always remember her kind spirit trying to understand us, and treat us like we had the ability to figure things out and make the right decisions.” Waiting for this shoe to dry, he worked on the other one, repeating the same actions.

“Being an orphan at an early age, it was my first experience being loved and treated like my opinion and life mattered. It was different from many experiences I had had with adults before and at times after that. I will never forget her and the lessons she instilled in me. I know she wasn’t perfect, and Americans aren’t perfect, and not all Americans aren’t like her, but, seeing you makes me think of her, so seeing you makes me happy.” He now joins the other high heel with its partner and looks for another set of shoes as he stops talking and allows himself to remember.

I walk across the bus terminal to attend to my fourth pulperia run for the day. It is late afternoon, and Doña Pancha has set up her tamale table and umbrella, and offers a friendly, “May you go well,” as I pass by. Doña Maria has set up her baleada stand across the way, and I think about her advanced level of natural business shrewdness. On my way back, the cheese man offers me a sample of cheese, and says the one word he knows in English, butter. Doña Martha states once again that she has baleadas today, with eggs, chorizo and avocado, and I have to deny her with the diet excuse. Behind each of these greetings and humble store fronts are novels full of stories just as colorful and meaningful as Ernesto’s, and his same unflinchable tenacity for their daily repeated expertise.