The Pech Indians and the Truxillo Railroad

The Pech Indians and the Truxillo Railroad

By Wendy Griffin 

 

The first ethnographic study of the Pech Indians was done by a former employee of the Truxillo Railroad Eduard Conzemius, a native of Luxembourg. He studied Pech history, culture, location, and language between 1919 and 1927. He noticed the Spanish flu epidemic 1918-1920 killed about one third of the population of the Pech Indians.  

When the Truxillo Railroad expanded along the Sico and Paulaya rivers they displaced Pech villages. Although their concession said they had to pay for land that was inhabited when they passed through, according Aniceto Duarte, the employees of the Truxillo Railroad came to their house and told they had to move and that the government had given them this land. Aniceto’s father moved to Culmi where he married Pech woman from there. Others went to live on the Rio Platano.

In the 1930’s a Ladino rancher from Olancho got land outside of Trujillo and brought up two Pech couples to settle there and take care of his cattle. After that when Pech from Culmi would come up selling pigs, they would stay at the houses of the Pech couples noted Don Carlos Duarte who made the trip once.

The first time I was aware of these pig selling trips was in Stephen Echerd’s field notes on the Pech language where he collected in Pech and translated into Spanish stories, including the life and death of Ivan Betancourt and the selling of pigs in Trujillo. It was 10 days to Trujillo with the pigs and 5 days back without them.  Although mostly men made the trip, sometimes women went too. Dona Juana’s grandmother made the trip to buy a cast iron kettle to cook sugar cane juice in to make “rapadura” or “dulce”, raw sugar made into blocks. She regaled Dona Juana with the amazing things she saw like coconut trees that could grow beside the salty sea. Coconuts are called sea trees in Pech. 

Don Amado, the father of Hernan Martinez, met a man coming up from Catacamas selling pigs who wanted someone to go with him. So Don Amado went. After the man sold the pigs, he wanted to take the train back as far as it went in Olancho, and so a friend who had a ranch in Bonito Oriental said leave the boy with me and he can work for me. So for two years Don Amado worked on a ranch with cattle, houses, and mules, and learned a lot.

Meanwhile his family at home was worried and after two years sent word that he should come home. Then they married him to Dona Amada, so that he would no longer wander.

Doris Stone said the Payas sometimes came to the North Coast to work for the banana company, but as soon as they finished their contract, they would go home. Also they went home for ceremonies which were still being done into the 1950’s. 

There is controversy about whether the United Fruit’s Truxillo Railroad company was good for local commerce or not. While they did have a commissary, people seemed to buy from fresh vegetable and breadsellers, from locals who had dairy cattle, and the company had a butcher shop in Jerico that bought pigs and cattle to satisfy the local demand and the demand along the line. Arabs sold cloth and other goods. So it would seem that local commerce prospered in spite of the Truxillo railroad’s commissary and ships which brought in special things for Christmas.  

Honduran Garifuna and Bay Islander Sailors—Problems of Old Age and Death

Honduran Garifuna and Bay Islander Sailors—Problems of Old Age and Death

By Wendy Griffin

(Part 4 of 4)

Honduran sailors who are residents in the United States and that are not citizens, often do not recive Social Security for their work as a sailor. This might be because the company who they are working for, even though they leave fromUS ports, the company is not American. For example, the company of the ships of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) was the Empresa Hondureña de Vapores (Honduran Steamship company), a Honduran company, and in that way they could pay less taxes and maybe lower salaries. Most ships in the World are registered under flags of convenience like Panama,instead of the ports they ship out of.

Maybe the problem is also that the sailors themselves are not Americans, and sometimes are just working with sailor visa instead of permanant residency. Many ships where Afro-Hondurans currently work leave from European ports,and thus of course, they would not be eligible for an American pension. It also affects them if they change companies they work for every year, as Dorn Ebanks’ father did.

Sometimes they also don’t receive pensions from the shipping company which owns the ships, even if the company like United Fruit is American. Previously it was impossible to obtain dual citizenship so some sailors chose to keep their Honduran citizenship so they could retire and return home without problems, like my Garifuna friend Sebastian Marin, even though he had the prerequisites to become a US citizen. So they suffered from lack of income in their old age after having worked 30 or 35 years on ships outside of Honduras, and they depend on their children to help them out.

Sailors who became US citizens sometimes have rights to Social Security when they retire, but it still depends on the nationality of the company they work for. Before double citizenship was made legal in the administration of Ricardo Maduro, US citizen Garifunas had to leave the Honduras even six months, as Don Vilo a Garifuna sailor of Trujillo whose son now lives in Atlanta, also a sailor.

For the question of taking care of grandchildren of their daughters who are working, sometimes the wife of an old sailor will stay in the US after his retirement, and so he remains alone if he retires back to Honduras, without someone to take care of him if he becomes sick or keep  him company in his old age, after so many years of helping economically to raise children and take care of his wife, as happened to my friend Sebastian Marin.

If a Honduran Sailor Dies with his Family in Honduras

One of the first organizations Afro-Latin Americans organize are associations which arrange to bury a worker, if death surprises him while working outside of his home town or home country.  Many sailors were unaware that even if they are US citizens and have 29 years working on ships out of the United States, as was the case of Rosalina Garcia of Trujillo, their family and their minor children recieve nothing from Social Security, if the wife and children have not lived with him in the US for at least 10 years, legally married.

The sailor husband of Rosalina Garcia who left 4 children in Honduras when he died alone in a room in Houston, Texas, suddenly after working as a sailor and living  legally in the US for 29 years. Their youngest daughter was 4 years old. According to letters, pamphlets, and the Social Security Internet site, they received nothing in Social Security because there is no treaty about Social Security with the countries of Latin America in the case that one of their citizens who was working legally in the US, but died leaving family in their country of origin.    These Social Security benefits are called Survivor Benefits and are to help the family raise any children under 18 years old.

What is suspicious about these Social Security treaties is that they exist for the majority of the countries of Western Europe, but there are no Social Security treaties with the countries of Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean or Africa, where the majority of sailors come from.

This problem that the wife receives nothing in Social Security if she has never lived in the US, and then her US citizen husband dies, as happens often when US retirees marry Latin American women on the North Coast of Honduras. The Latina wives of these retirees sometimes pass into tremendous poverty when their late in life husband dies.

 

 

 

 

Closing Doors to Poor Afro-Hondurans who want to be Merchant Marines

Closing Doors to Poor Afro-Hondurans who want to be Merchant Marines

By Wendy Griffin

(Part 3 of 4)

Previously it was easy to get work as a merchant marine for Honduran Garifunas and Bay Islanders.  Some began because through a family member or a friend,they got a letter offering themwork as a merchant marine. For example,the uncle of Herman Alvarez of San  Juan, Tela got a letter offering work for Herman’s brother more than 30 agos, and this brother until now is still a merchant marine. Garifunas often work for indirect contractors like ship chandler’s companies. In recent years a woman in New York asks for payment to get or send these offers of work.

Others like Sabas Whittaker would go down to the port and present himself to the capitán and the capitán often accepted to take him aboard as a sailor. Even though originally most of the people who were sailors were Black English speakers and Garifunas, later many Honduran mestixos who spoke some English also applied and became sailors. Some eventually learned several languages, knew countries all over the world,and some were excellent cooks.  In Santa Fe, Honduras in Restaurante Caballero, an older Garifuna Pedro Caballero, previously a cook on a cruise boat, has his restaurant, and international tourists fromthe US, Canada, and Europe go to Santa Fe just to eat his food.

If one had a good record with the banana company on their ships, they helped the merchant marine immigrate to the US with his whole family reported Sebastian Marin, a Garifuna in Trujillo who worked 35 years for United Fruit’s Worldwide Shipping. According to the book on Afro-Central Americans in New York by Dr. Sarah England, almost all the families now resident in New York City started arriving there with a family member who was a merchant marine. According to Dorn Ebanks,currently the Mayor of Roatan in the Honduran Bay Islands, almost an entire generation of Bay Islander men were away working internationally as merchant marines like his father during decades.

The father of Dorn Ebanks returned to the Bay Islands, but other Bay Islanders and English speaking Blacks from the North Coast remained in the US, for example in Brooklyn or in New Orleans before Katrina. In the past the Bay Islander sailors built their homes they planned to retire to and to return home to on vacations in the Bay Islands,but with the high cost of real estate in the Bay Islands due to the invasion of the tourist industry and foreign residents there, many merchant marines no longer are able to build their own home on the Bay Islands.

Over the last 20 years there have arisen many obstacles to young Afro-Honduran men becoming merchant marines. For example, they are now required to pass a one week course in Omoa, Honduras. This costs almost $1,000 between bus fare, food, lodging, and the registration fee.  The young people are required to get an identity card and a passport, the last one they must pay for.  They have to travel to Tegucigalpa with all of those costs to get a Seaman’s Book, which is supposed to be free, but frequently government officials require a bribe to do it. The sailor also requires an American visa, which costs $130 just for the interview to get the visa, and visas for Hondurans are now extended in the US El Salvadoran Embassy.

Now the owners of ships require that merchant marines have finished high school and speak English and even sometimes European languages like Italian. Hondurans are now competing against Eastern Europeans to get a job.  There are no high schools which offer grades 10-12 in most Garifuna and Bay Islander communities, and also there were not courses on how to read, write, and speak English. The Honduran government has dealt with this problem by beginning to offer online English courses this year. Also the US Congress has passed laws that certain kinds of ships must use US citizen employees.   

The lack of the possibility to immigrate legally as a sailor has meant that illegal immigration of younger Garifunas has increased. In an article for HondurasWeekly.com Canadian sociologist estimated 50%  of the Garifunas between 13 and 21 years old had immigrated to the US. Since the boys can not get a good job like a merchant marine, they are not forming stablefamilies and maintaining their girl friends and their children. The actions of the Honduran government like trying toforce the Garifunas of various communities off their land also increases the likelihood of immigration to the US. Many of those who are immigrating have family members in the US, but after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers in New York in 2001,processing of family reunification visas has almost ground to a halt.

Previously  Merchant Marines who learned English had the option of taking the GED exam for high school equivalency in the US. There were correspondence courses to prepare for this exam. In this way they could qualify to study in US colleges. This is what Sabas Whittaker did, eventually completing a Master’s degree. Now the US government does not permit people who are not Americans to take the GED, closing another door to young Afro-Hondurans.

Also now after 9/11there are more difficulties to get the visa which is only given for one year. There have been recent cases of Garifunas who were working as sailors, they were working well, the company wanted them to continue working,  but in the middle of the sea voyage the US did not renew their sailor’s visa and they had to return home to Honduras where there are complaints of serious unemployment.

  

 

 

 

 

Many Afro-Honduran Immigrants Originally Merchant Marine Sailors and their Problems Part I and II

Many Afro-Honduran Immigrants Originally Merchant Marine Sailors  

(Part 1 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

“Before, the Garifuna sailors were the best sailors in the world,” begins the video on the Internet about the life of Honduran Garifuna singer Aurelio Martinez, “La Aventura Garifuna” (The Garifuna Adventure). Honduras has the second number in the world of registered merchant seamen, after the Philippines. Previously most of the sailors were from two of Honduras’s afro-Honduran groups—the Garifunas and the Black English speakers. This is almost incredible when you realize that there are only 8 million people in all of Honduras, or about the size of New York City.

The Garifunas are descendants of Carib and Arawak Indians from the Island of St.Vincent, who formed families with Africans who arrived on the Island in different manners, including shipwrekcs, escaping by sea from slave owning islands nearby like Barbados, and according to oral traditions pre-Columbian Blacks. After losing two wars with the British, the Garifunas were exiled to Honduras in 1797. Many of their traditional communities are near the traditional ports of the Banana Companies of Honduras—Puerto Cortes, Tela, La Ceiba, and Trujillo. Many Garifuna men lived by fishing prior to incorporating themselves in the work of the banana companies, first on the docks, then on the ships.

The English speaking Blacks of Honduras arrived in Honduras from different islands like Gran Cayman and Jamaica, or neighboring countries like Belize and Nicaragua. Most arrived after slavery was abolished in the British Empire. They also increased immigration to Honduras during the Banana Boom in the early 20^th century. They also settled in the ports and in the Bay Islands located off of Honduras’s North Coast. They also were famous as seaman navigating between Belize and the Bay Islands in their skiffs and dories. Currently these two Afro-Honduran ethnic groups make up 3% of the Honduran population, but there are still dozens of communities in Honduras where these ethnic groups make up the majority. Both groups are heavily affected by immigration to the US.

Garifunas in the Second World War

Before the beginning of the building of railroads for the banana companies in Honduras, the Garifunas and the English speaking Blacks, were active in the planting, harvesting, and sale of bananas. Also recruiters looking for workers to build the Panama Canal arrived at the doors of their homes looking for people to help build this massive work of infrastructure. The Canal was finished in the same year the banana companies arrived to build railway beds, ports, and worker barracks and plant bananas on new concessions of land. The Banana companies built the ports at La Ceiba, Tela, and Puerto Castilla/Trujillo and used the government built port at Puerto Cortes. The Garifunas and Black English speakers formed an important part of the labor available to the banana companies on the North Coast and many Garifunas became trilingual (English-Spanish-Garifuna).

United Fruit, the owner of the Truxillo Railroad in Northeastern Honduras, began to shut down most of its operations and was barely functioning in 1942 when Puerto Castilla was taken over for a US Navy Base against German U boats who might try to enter the Western Caribbean. Given the lack of work on the mainland in bananas, the Garifuna men accepted to become merchant marines during WWII.  The ships of United Fruit (now Chiquita), and Standard Fruit (now owned by Dole), acted as logistics support to the war effort in WWII, and the Afro-Honduran merchant marines manned them. There was a scarcity of white American sailors at the time due to the large number of men involved in fighting the Second World War, and this opened a doorway of opportunity for Afro-Hondurans to get hired as merchant marines.

My Garifuna friend and former sailor for United Fruit’s Worldwide Shipping Sebastian Marin was in the Pacific during World War II, including in Pearl Harbor.In spite of the name “The Great White Fleet”, sometimes it was necessary to paint the boats grey color to be able to pass unobserved by the Japonese or German U boats, observed Sabas Whittaker, an Afro-Honduran, who formerly worked as a merchant marine.

Since the Black English speakers spoke English, many Bay Islanders after 1950 were accepted to work in cruise boats with tourists, reaching good positions like purser or head of security. Many Garifunas worked in cooking, as it was the custom of Garifuna mothers to teach their sons to cook, in case their wife was sick or away, but sometimes they also worked as saloonman, in security, or in cleaning.

These Garifuna sailors have the right to be included in the list of veterans of the Second World War at this Memorial in Washington, DC. Other Garifunas of Honduras and Belize worked in the Canal Zone in Panama during the Second World War.  Belizean Garifunas also fought as part of Allied forces with the British during the War. “It is time to recognize these Afro-Honduran sailors who helped with logistics in the Second World War. It was the only way to get things and people to these theaters of war at the time,” said Sabas Whittaker, author of Africans in the Americas, who now resides in Hartford, Conneticut.

The practice of using Afro-Hispanic merchant marines continues until today. During the War between England and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the British used a ship of the Cunard Lines for logistics, where Sabas’s brother worked. Ships carrying arms and soldiers to Iraq carry Afro-Honduran civilian chefs like Rigoberto Calix’s brother, based out of Houston. These Afro-Honduran merchant marines are civilians, not military, and belong to a sailor’s union. Sailors with a good record until recently were allowed to immigrate to the US with all their family members, which is the origin of the large Garifuna communities in the US like in New York City.In addition to military transport ships, they also work on civilian cargo ships, like petroleum frieghters, like Balbina Chimilio’s son and son-in-law in Atlanta.

Special  Problems Face Families of Afro-Honduran Merchant Marines

(Part 2 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

If the husband of a Garifuna woman is a sailor, this implies many difficulties for him, her, and their family, since the man is away from his family 4-6 months at a time, and previously they only gave vacation once a year, according to older sailors. For example, the mother of Garifuna painter Herman Alvarez was very strict with him, but he believes it was because she was under a lot of stress having to play the roles of mother and father with him, while his father worked as a sailor for United Fruit. At that time the men only returned home once a year, instead of twice a year as is currently the norm.

Also the work of sailor is hard, with 70 hours of work a week minimal, and frequent overtime. Salaries are currently relatively low, because the ships take out for room and board and there are no benefits for many sailors. A Garifuna friend was recently  offered a contracto of $440/a month after taking out room and board, for a 70 hour work week, and the possibility of overtime at $2.40 an hour. According to his ex-wife after a time, he earned $1,000 a month.  Salaries before were reported at $1,500 to $2,000 a month, reported former Bay Islander sailors. When the old Garifuna sailors started working, the salaries were extremely low, as little as $1 a day.

It   also seems to be dangerous work, since several of the Garifunas and Bay Islanders I have known who were sailors, have died from on board accidents or were injured, such as an eye problem. These mostly seem to have been cases where little or no compensation was paid to the sailor if he lived, or to his family if he died.

Many of the Honduran sailors were exposed to asbestos on ships, but their legal cases were put on an inactive docket, and their cases not heard. Cancers can develop from asbestos exposure. Currently the way asbestos litigation is handled has changed, maybe they would be eligible.

Maybe the courts were not hearing their cases, because the workers were not American, and often the ships have flags of registration that they are not American, so maybe these sailors were not considered “American employees”, and were outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. Even though the economy of the US depends a great deal on imports, no one thinks of the working conditions of the sailors who bring us these products.

Honduran Arts and Artists Suffer in these Difficult Economic times

Honduran Arts and Artists Suffer in these Difficult Economic times

By Wendy Griffin

If US organizations have 501 (c) 3 status from the IRS in the US as non-profits, US people can donate to them and take a deduction on their income taxes. This encourages people and companies who have money in the US to donate to the arts, and other cultural and social service organizations, which is a big reason why these exist in the US. In Honduras, this type of incentive does not exist, and partly for this reason, it is not common for Honduran businesses or well to do individuals to financially support cultural or social service institutions in Honduras.  The recent crisis of the San Pedro Museum of Anthropology and History, run by a private organization, which almost closed due to insufficient funds for operating costs and is still facing financial hard times, is an example of these types of crisis.

The general income level of Honduras, with most people having incomes significantly below the L100,000 a year  income bracket which is required to pay income taxes in Honduras, also affects the fact that little private  or tax based Honduran money is available for the arts and social services sectors.  Newspapers in San Pedro said Honduran parents in San Pedro often reacted negatively to initiatives of the schools to take the students to Museums as they have to pay a small entrance fee.

This confirms my experience in Trujillo. When David Flores has taken Tegucigalpa high school students to Trujillo, they have sometimes refused to get off the bus to go into the Rufino Galan Museum, which he tells them is not be missed as one of the best museums of the history of the North Coast and which they drived 12 hours to see, because they did not want to pay a L20 (1 dollar) entrance fee.

Many Honduran artists, musicians, authors, folkdance groups, etc. look to the Honduran Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports (SCAD) for help, but as former Vice Minister of Culture Salvador Suazo used to say, 80% of the budget of SCAD goes to support sports, particularly the “Selección Nacional”, the national team that competes in Soccer World Cup eliminations and, if lucky, the World Cup finals.

 After the Ministry pays for sports, a full time marimba band which plays Honduran folkdance music of the Ladinos, a permanant folkdance group for Ladino folkdances, folkdance festivals of Ladino folkdances, libraries and the National Archive, it has no money left, and especially no money for minority ethnic groups who are not represented or funded at all by the office of Popular Culture of the Ministry. The National Garifuna Folklore Ballet, previously part of SCAD and its  office of Folklore, the predecessor of the Popular Culture office, is now administratively an autonomous organization part of Casa Garinagu (Garifuna House), located near Central Park.

In a recent La Prensa article, that national paper reported that the National Art Galley, run by the Ministry of Culture (SCAD), had closed its doors in Tegucigalpa, because it did not have money for salaries and utilities and in fact owed months of back pay to its employees.  

 It is also a mystery why  the Honduran Ministry of Culture has an attitude of not commercially using its marimba group, folkdance group, printing company, etc., to make money.  Prior to Hurricane Mitch, they even had a recording studio. There are no commercially available CD’s of Honduran folkdance music for sale, no commercially available video of Honduran folkdances, and it is very difficult to find out what books the Ministry has published and where they are sold. With all the assets it has, why it sells or promotes nothing, not even its own programs, and thus has no money for more arts and cultural programs in Honduras, is a mystery to people who work in the Arts in Honduras. The Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes does have a website if people are interested in knowing what the Honduran government makes known about Honduran culture.   

The Honduran Minister of Culture Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales offered to do a book presentation of Antonieta Maximo’s new book of poetry, “Duda”, but it has not happened yet. Although the only costs of a book presentation are invitations and maybe some soft drinks afterwards,  the current economic crisis of the Honduran government apparently makes it difficult for Honduran government cultural organizations like SCAD and the Honduran Institute of History and Anthropology (IHAH) to find even these minor resources to help support poets and historians who write books published in Honduras.

When I offered to do a book presentation of the new book “Gold Mining, Black Slaves and Interethnic Relations in the XVI century” written by Pastor Gomez and published by IHAH, during African Heritage Month (April) in Trujillo this year to help make known this excellent book which explains who were the non-Garifuna blacks in Honduras in this period and has one of the best descriptions of slavery and how it arose and developed to come to the New World that I have seen in any language, the person from IHAH in charge in Trujillo said, “No”, because they would have to send out invitations. My attempts to have them make available for sale in Trujillo this book have failed, although they do have a small bookshop here in the fort.

 Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, a Garifuna from Trujillo who had previously been a Congressman in the Central American Parliament for 6 years,  became Minister of Culture after  a scandal caused by the previous Minister of Culture having spent the whole year’s budget in 6 months, so he started with a serious deficit to begin with, so the fact that they have done anything, like publish Miskito Indian  Scott Wood’s book La Mosquitia Desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from the Inside) in May 2013, or helped support  a seminar on editing Wikipedia pages for the Network of Local Historians in Siguatepeque in August 2013 , donated books published by the Ministry to the reading program in Pinalejo, Santa Barbara and gone to unprecedented Council of Minister meetings in expensive places like Puerto Lempira in the Mosquitia is to be commended.

Honduras has two specialized high schools for the Arts, la Escuela de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts High School) in Tegucigalpa which emphasizes the plastic arts like painting, sculpting, drawing, etc. and Victoriano Lopez Music School in San Pedro Sula, which combines playing classical western musical instruments with a regular high school curriculum. These were both founded decades before it was popular to have fine arts high schools in the US.

 Students from the Fine Arts High School often go on to become high school art teachers, like David Flores who teaches in Teguicgalpa and Maxima Tomas, a Garifuna painter who used to teach in Tela, and many also sell paintings commercially as Napoleon Villalta Crespo and Maxima Tomas did previously in Tela. The students who graduate from the Victoriano often receive scholarships to study internationally and many end up playing in orchestras outside of Honduras, reported Fernando Aparicio, a San Pedro Sula businessman whose son attends there.

 Both survive based on multiple funding streams, including from the Honduran Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture, reduced tuition paid by parents, and in the case of the Victoriano help from the San Pedro Sula city government. All of these funding streams have been cut or eliminated.  Particularly with the School of Fine Arts it is not clear if it will continue to exist as a high school, or if it will become annexed to the university’s art program because of lack of funds to keep it open and reorganization within the Ministry of Education, reported a retired high school arts teacher from there. 

The topic of the lack of government funding for art, literature, books, plays, etc. and the decision to invest principally in agriculture, most of the projects of which did not give good results,  is a reoccurring theme in Cesar Indiano’s very interesting and beautifully written book, Los Hijos del Infortunio (The Sons of Misfortune).  His comments on the decision to invest in agriculture  which led to developing people who have unfulfillable thirst and hunger for food and full bellies, instead of culture which might have inspired them and led to them creating works of beauty and  work for people who create beauty are intriguing and not as implausible as it might sound.

My city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has indeed invested in art, such as donating buildings for artists and art projects in the inner city, as a way to stabilize some neighborhoods. Where Antonieta Maximo lives in New York is in a building for artists which was built as a way to stabilize the Times Square area which it did. Even the creation of the UNAH’s Center for Art and Culture (UNAH.CAC) on Parque La Libertad in Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa’s twin city, was to stabilize a neighborhood that was going downhill right in front of the Fine Arts High School and the Immaculate Conception Church, originally built to serve the Indians of Comayagüela in the colonial period. This made the Fine Arts students afraid to take the bus there.

 According to a former student of the Fine Arts High School, Abner Flores, the creation of this UNAH Art Center was effective in controlling the spiraling downhill slide of that neighborhood and in fact he had no problems taking the bus during three years there. When we visited the park and the UNAH-CAC for the Central American Linguist’s Conference in August 2013, the park seemed safe and clean, even better kept that La Merced Park in front of the Museum of Art in central Tegucigalpa. So it seems investing in arts does help control crime and inspire beauty even in a time of financial crisis.

The fact that Honduras’s small cities have kept alive dance-theater presentations like Guancascos in Gracias and Mejicapa or Moors and Christians in Ojojona and in Trujillo and in Ocotepeque, or that Danza del Diablito in Comayagua is part of the 1578 play of the Martyrdom of San Sebastian which has been presented most years since it was brought to Honduras before the Pilgrims even thought of going to the US, shows that in spite of the poverty for which these areas are famous, many Honduran people value art and keep it alive at great personal sacrifice of time and money.   New York Broadway plays count success in months or years of playing on Broadway, in Honduras some of these shows have been playing for centuries.

Given the current economic crisis both within Honduras and among the countries who have traditionally been donors and tourists, this is a hard time to depend on art, and especially on national funding of art and culture, in Honduras. Yet there are independent Garifunas artists like Cruz Bermudez in Tela of Galería El Aura down the street a little from Villas Telamar, Herman Alvarez of San Juan outside of Tela  and Lino Leiva in Trujillo who sells in the beach restaurants at lunchtime that keep their families fed and in school  with what they make selling paintings. Lino says, “Thank God that I have this gift, this talent that I can paint and with this I maintain fed my family.” Cruz Bermudez in particular would like to teach other young people along the Coast to paint, but has not found support to do so yet.

 

US artist who has lived in Honduras for many years Guillermo Yuscaran also reports that tourist buying of his books and paintings has gone down as tourism in Honduras has gone down due to reports of crime. I am interested in trying to bring up Honduran paintings for painting exhibitions, maybe through a National Endowment of the Arts grants. 

Music that inspired my work, especially my work in Honduras

Music that inspired my work, especially my work in Honduras

By Wendy Griffin

 I learned in Vacation Bible School the following song.

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.

Red, Brown, yellow, black and White,

They are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the whole.

From this song I learned Jesus loved me, he loved the other little children like the Pech and the Garifunas, and I should love them too, just as he does. I learned this song in a Southern town that still had segregated schools.

 

In high school I learned two church songs which would also inspire me

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in Lord, (twice)

And we pray that all unity will one day be restored

And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love,

Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

I did not feel I needed to convert people, just show them God’s love, that they were not forsaken, that God sent me to see how they were doing.

The song below is from the song book Carols Hot and Cool that we used in Senior High at Church.

He was a Rebel, yes a Rebel,

He changed wáter into wine,

He was human and divine,

And what he told the people sounded like treason.

He said you’re as good as me,

Though you’re from a strange country,

Though you’re  red or White or Black as Ebony.

 

Later at an ordination service of a gay man and a lesbian couple to be pastors for the San Francisco AIDS Mission, I learned the song Spirit, which I only partly know the words of, but which I felt were part of my call to go and work in Central America.

 

I the Lord of Sea and Sky,

I have Heard my people cry.

I would send a Word to them,

Who shall I send?

Is it I, Lord?

I have Heard you calling in the night.

I will lead them (if you help me)

I will hold your people in my heart.

Perhaps the idea to work overseas and help others came from a book in the church library which I volunteered with during my senior high years. That book was called They Lived Their Love, and was in my mind the complement of the song They will Know We are Christians by Our Love.


My ideas about the idea that we should be doing something else besides making war on each other partly came from the song on a Peter, Paul, and Mary album Where have all the flowers gone? In the song the flowers go toyoung girls, the Young girls go toyoung men, theyoung men go to soldiers, and the soldiers go to  graveyards, which go to flowers. When willthey ever learn, when will they ever learn? was the chorus. Apparantly the answer is Not yet.

 

 

 

 

 

What I learned in Nicaragua in 1980 how i came to teach English and Indigenous languages in Honduras

The Most Important Things I learned in Nicaragua in 1980 and How I came to Teach English and later Indigenous languages in Honduras.

 

By Wendy Griffin 6/18/2015

 

My abosolutely favorite sermón I Heard in Managua Nicaragua in the misas de gallo leading up to Christmas of 1980, the first year of the Sandista victory. It was given by the Papal Nuncio in achurch where the walls of the church had fallen down first in the earthquake that destroyed Managua and later they were rebuilt,but felldown in a minor earthquake and they asked the nuns who tended the church wouldn't it be better to leave it was because it let the breezes in? Any way he asked the Nicaraguan children and I who came to the misa de gallo (5am masses because that is when the rosters crow) how do we know Jesús Christ came to minister to the poor? 

 

Because he was born in a manger.  If his father had been rich, and said when he was approaching Bethlehem after hearing there was no room in the inns,  there is 100 dollars or dinari to the first person who will turn their children out of bed and give a bed to my pregant  wife who is in labor, do you think there would have been a bed made available for her?  Of course!  It was because he was born to a poor family that there was no room in the inn. Doesn't that ring totally true?

 

Later that week we did La Posada  in the church, where after being told that there was no room (no hay posada) in various homes, we go to the church and the doors are opened and the people are told In our church there is room for everyone and we all go in, including Mary, and Joseph who had not found posada ( aplace to rest) eleswhere on their journey that night. Garífuna posadas are substantially different.

 

A few years later I went to East Liberty Presbyterian Church which has a huge main church, but they decided to do the candlelight and carols service at 7 pm, the same time as La posada in Nicaragua, in their chapel, even though they have a 1,000 members in the church. I went and there was no room for me in the East Liberty Presbyterian church service in the chapel and I cried. I missed the humble Nicaraguans terribly who said in our church there is room for every one, and maybe we do not even need walls to keep anyone out.

 

I was also in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in Indigenous Languages. Although it later went badly for them, it left me with the idea that it was posible and had many good reasons in its favor. I went on to study the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in Indigenous languages more in depth during my Master’s degree in Education at the University of Pittsburgh because i Heard of it while i was there. This is also how I first became interested in the Miskito Indians who I later worked with in Honduras and who I also studied their role in the Contra War at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

When I was in Nicaragua the people in Managua were happy the Somoza regime had been overthrown and that peace reigned in Nicaragua and the Army did not terrorize the local people. The worst complaint i Heard against the sandistas was the high Price of chicken which was not their fault since 60% of chickens were imported, mostly from the United States.

 

I was very sad the US government used my work in Nicaragua to justify supporting the Contras, and even more angry when I learned the relationship of drugs and the Iran-Contra Affair. When the opportunity came up to work in Honduras teaching English, a program started as part of the foreign aid the US government gave to Honduras to bribe them to let the Contras stay in Honduras (Nicaragua Libre was in the Honduran Department of El Paraiso and not in Nicaragua and displaced internally Honduran peasants who came to speak at the University), I accepted it saying, I will try to make sure that Honduras gets something good out of what was recognizably a bad situation. The Foreign Language major at the National Teacher’s College remains and is its largest major, a whole new building was built to house all the students. My 30 years of working in Honduras was partially trying to do penance or in some small way make up  for all the evil that was done as a result of my work in Nicaragua on the eve of Ronald Reagon coming into office and my government’s work in Central America during this period.

 

During my working at the US Embassy in Managua, and later working for USIS in Honduras i had the opportunity to observe other people who worked at the US Embassy. I had briefly thought that with degrees in Area Studies and having studied foreign languages I might be a good candidate to work in the foreign service, in the US Embassies abroad. But in Honduras i was told by the employees that the job of the employees of the US Embassy was to represent the government of the United States and not to try to meet the needs of local people. A US Ambassador to Honduras John Ferch was recalled after a short time in Honduras because he tried to represent Honduras’s needs instead of the US government’s policies. I felt given what i had seen of US foreign policy in Managua and Tegucigalpa, I was not cut out to work for the diplomatic service. I also thought that since I had studied Area studies, and foreign languages and had an Associate Degree in Business administration, I could work in international business, which however it turned out that I had no taste for either.

 

By the time I got out of the US Air Force in August of 1981, I had the idea that I did not want to be another suburban housewife, that instead my calling was to work with the poor in Central America, whom I had seen in Guatemala during the time of the masacres of the Maya Indians, and in Managua, but I did not know what type of help the poor needed or what type of training I needed to get to be able to be of real use for them.   So I chose to go to Asia and work in work camps (I worked among the Tamils of Sri Lanka about 3 months before the 27 year civil war broke out), and teaching English for the YMCA, and observe what kind of projects people were doing with the poor in Asia that I could learn the skills to do.

 

I tell the story that I was called to be an English teacher in the rainforest. I worked for the Tamils in Mylanthanie (Place of the Peacock) where the Tamils fought to keep elephants out of their rice paddies and the teachers only had 4th grade educations. But I had developed a cough from going from the heat of Agra where the Taj Mahal is, to Srinigar in the Himalayan mountains and visiting the glaciers, so I was in Batticoloa on the Coast which had a Christian church, i don’t remember if Catholic or Anglican, but i think  Catholic. I went into the church, and fell asleep in the pew. When i woke up I had an overwhelming sensation that I needed to go and check my mail. I received mail at the American Express office  in Colombo an all night train ride, but I had time before i had to go back to Mylanthanie, so I went and caught the train.

 

I had written to the YMCA Overservice Board that if they were looking for someone between 20 and 30 years old, of Christian orientation, who was interested in foriegn languages and cultures to teach English in Taiwan or Japan, they were looking for me. In Colombo there was a telegram saying expecting you in Taipei on Friday for orientation.

 

This put me in a quandry as I was supposed to supervise teachers for the Gandyam Society in Sri Lanka, an unpaid job, for another two months, but the Taiwan job was a paid job. I had studied East Asian studies at Western Washington State College, and it would be great to work and learn in Taiwan. Also it is not posible to get from Colombo on Tuesday, get a visa for taiwan in Hongkong, a flight there and a twoday process, and turn in my resignation in Mylanthanie where i had left all my things. But i wrote back, I will be in Taipei on Saturday. I went back to Mylanthanie and got my things, and turned around and flew to Hong Kong, got my two month extendable B visa, and flew to Taipei. When i got to Taipei they said, We were not expecting you,but since you are here, you can teach English at the Kaohisung YMCA where I worked for a year. While i was there, the head of all YMCA programs in Asia came to lunch, and I asked him if he knew anything about teaching in Thailand. He said he had just come from Thailand, and they were asking for an English teaching volunteer, if i was interested he could arrange it. So I taught English for two years in Asia, and observed projects being done as development.

 

I was talking to the Presbyterian missionary who went to the Interdenominational English speaking church in Kaohsiung about my quandry about how i did not know what kind of work was useful for me to do to help local people. He said maybe you are called to teach English, what you are doing. In Thailand I was over my head as i had to do teacher training, curriculum development, textbook writing, in addition to teaching my own classes. While overseas i learned what most people asked for for overseas English teachers was  a Master’s degree and 2 years experience. I had the two years of experience but i did not have the Master’s degree.

 

I flew back to my home town of Pittsburgh, PA at Thanksgiving and happened to see that the University of Pittsburgh offered a combined International Development Education Program (IDEP)/TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of other languages). I interviewed and submitted papers and was accepted to start in January 1985.   Unfortunately I did not like the program. The good TESOL professors  who had made the department famous were all in administrative positions and my teacher had less experience than i did.  The IDEP program was too theoretical for what i wanted to do. I got out my little Whole World handbook Guide to Work Study and Travel around the World put out by CIEE, and looked what they had in Latin America. They had the USIS English teacher training program, so I applied to that and transferred back to Western Washington State College for the summer where i took a Writing course that influenced my decisión to write for Honduras This Week.

 

Because USIS is on the East Coast they called me at 7 am, and asked if I wanted to start the first English teacher training program in Honduras? My dream job and I was not even 30 years old yet.  I accepted and later  I had to callthem back to ask how much it paid. I was told I had to be there before Thanksgiving,and that i show i began teaching at the National Teacher’s College in Tegucigalpa,Honduras. Since they had an extensión Project to help the Pech Indians get bilingual intercultural education I got involved with that, and 30 years later I am still trying to help that Project. 

 

When I was in Honduras last year, the Catholic Church had an article on Ignacio Loyola, the founder the Jesuits, that originally he was a soldier but when he became wounded he became a priest and started the largest order within the Catholic Church. Hopefully the Central Americans will judge me by what I have done voluntarily to help them, instead of what happened as a result of being a poor person who joined the military to get job experience, some training (I learned Spanish at the Defense language institute of monterey, California), and an income when I was por and desperate for an income and a place to live. My work in Honduras was a way to make up for the unfortunate way I got to know Central America and showed that not all Americans agree with the policies of their government in the área.

So if I say that current US policies in Central America especially Honduras are similar to what they were in the 1980's, I did not read what those policies were, I lived them then and now. And if I say the situation of how the Garífunas and to some extent the Miskitos are being treated now reminds me of what started the 27 Tamil civil war it was because i was there and lived those months with them.