Why is the project focused on the small remote village of Linares and what work is to be done?

Why Linares? Because we had contacts there and we became aware of their need. Isn’t that how people get involved with anything? We have wanted to get connected at coffee origin in a meaningful way for years and this was the first legitimate opportunity to do so that we felt good about.

In this life, I have come to grips with the reality that there is often a marked difference between what I think needs to be done and what actually needs to be done. This most certainly holds true in our endeavors in Linares. Here are a few cases in which my perception of how we can help clashed with what would be truly beneficial to the sweet families of the village. I will list them as “SM”: Stateside Mindset and “HM”: Honduras Mindset. The Stateside Mindset is not bad or without value but when the reality of the ground in Honduras is observed with an open mind and a desire to do real good, one should end up with an augmented perspective, ergo, the Honduras Mindset. Hopefully, this will bring some clarity to our work there in a few different categories.

WATER

SM: The water in Linares will make you sick. It is ‘clean’ by most Honduran standards but could be cleaner, therefore, they need our help in getting the water purified to US standards. After all, if can be done better, it should, right?

HM: The water coming into Linares is from a system that is fed by mountain stream headwaters and is not contaminated with any parasites. Some bacteria and algae build up in the holding tank over time but the villagers have learned how to clean it with natural items they have at hand in order to keep the water potable for them. North Americans would likely have some gastro problems if we were to drink it but Linarens’ bodies are conditioned to it so they do not get sick. In reality, if we were to install a purification system, it would of course be very clean but the villagers would then get sick from any other community’s water. In effect, we would be creating a solution in search of a problem – what’s more, this could easily produce further isolation for them since they would not be able to spend much time in another village or town: exactly the opposite of what they need.

FOOD SECURITY

SM: We could purchase seeds on this trip and introduce several high-yield food crops that can be grown in small plots for each home, ensuring both a wider, more nutritious diet and greater stability in the food supply.

HM: Many vegetables and foods that we think of as indispensable staples have never even been seen or heard of in Linares before. Consider for a second this:

This is a common fruit throughout Honduras. It looks and feels like some kind of alien food out of Deep Space Nine. When you crack through the rind, it’s fruit is like a slimy whited-out eyeball. No kidding. However, it is mild and sweet (the red ones are fully ripe and sweeter, the yellow ones tangy) with a wonderfully appetizing texture and these little guys are basically one of nature’s multi-vitamins. Faced with this “food” having never encountered it before, one would not be very likely to eat it – most would be dubious even after having it explained to them. This is a food that Linarens eat regularly. Amaranth, on the other hand is a highly productive grain that is grown in tall bush-like stalks – packed with dietary goodness and easy to grow, but they have never seen it before. How is it helpful to introduce foods that no one is likely to eat or even be able to sell at this point? Nothing is more culturally ingrained than an indigenous diet, so no, we did not foist a bunch of new crops on them so we could put a tally mark in the good deed column. Introducing new crops will have to be systemic and built up to over time. In the meantime, some simple agricultural techniques for growing yucca better fits the bill. More info on the implementation of an agriculture program in Linares will be in the next post.

COFFEE

SM: The villagers have not been tending or harvesting their coffee farms since Hurricane Mitch flattened them in 1998. We are a specialty coffee company so in light of our “knowledge base” it makes sense to help them start over from scratch with varietals of coffee that are suited to specialty grade quality. It will make them more money than they’ve ever made from a harvest before and help elevate awareness of their efforts and product.

HM: When we finally arrived in Linares, we found that having taken so long (over a year and a half) to get there since it was first proposed, two of the families had gotten to work on their own. One of the men had walked to several coffee farms in the region until he found someone that would give him a sack of coffee seeds in parchment. He then built two nursery beds out of bamboo, discarded irrigation hose and banana leaves and propagated 10,000 – yes, that’s ten thousand –  coffee seedlings, all of them a local catimor varietal called Lempira (of the same name as their money, a department of the country, and an indigenous hero).

Catimor has a portion of robusta in its genetics, the rest being arabica (the genetic lineage is a bit tedious – another time perhaps), which makes it more disease and pest resistant than many other varietals. It is also an overbearing varietal, meaning that it pumps out coffee cherries in copious amounts for 5 to 10 years and then slows down in production. This is the coffee that they are accustomed to growing (from years ago) and they already know how to handle it fairly well. Another aspect of this is that educational resources for specialty coffee in Honduras are still in development and can be hard to come by, especially so far in the back country of the Olancho department. In the case of Linares and at this point in time, practicality wins. We have garnered resources for the farmers that will boost their production of Lempira greatly but will also progress into specialty coffee a few years down the road. Again, more on the implementation of this in the next post. It is important to note that another aspect of “coming up” in Honduras is that becoming known as a small remote village that has suddenly sling-shotted into money is guaranteed to bring the kind of attention that they do not need right now – and we’ll leave it at that.

HEALTH CARE

SM: We expect to find some serious problems with the water supply (refer above on that) that need to be addressed and perhaps a resurgence of intestinal worms, especially in the children. We will assess the situation and put together a medical group for the next trip.

HM: We’ve covered how the water is not a problem for them at all. There has been no resurgence of worms or parasites of any kind. What we did find was a fungal infection in the skin of the feet of some of the children stemming from water that stands stagnate around the pilas (large sink-like structures that serve as the bathing, washing and kitchen sink station for a family) or washing rocks of many homes.

Treating the fungal infection makes no difference unless that standing water is taken care of so on the next trip we will be installing concrete around those areas and digging drainage ditches and then treat the medical need (hopefully all in one trip). This standing water also plays a role in another health concern: dengue fever. They have not had a problem with this mosquito-borne virus also known as breakbone fever in a long time but here it is. The mosquitoes pupate in standing water and emerge on the wing to spread this feverish and stiff jointed illness. In some cases, it can also lead to its life-threatening forms: dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome in which the blood platelets are progressively shredded, ending in death. There is no vaccine for Dengue and removing the mosquitoes’ breeding areas of stagnate water is the only course of action.

So why are we here in Linares? Well, there are a lot of answers to that but the only one that remains the same both pre- and post-trip is that relationship is a force for good and the only way that any of us change and grow.

Relationship - the basis for everything.

The mountain roads of Olancho are torturous. Like a washboard carved by the rivulets of a hundred rains, these passages are a challenge for both the body and the mind. Shadows falling across the road sometimes hide crevasses a foot deep and potholes you could hide a VW in. Vaughn took the roads to task and came out on top, finally bringing us safely to the small city of Gualaco, just ten minutes away from our target – the village of Linares.

If you are ever in Gualaco, there is but one hotel that should be on your agenda – the Hotel Mi Palacio. I believe the proprietor’s name is Berta but I do know that she is a hairdresser and barber whose shop is just a couple doors down the block from the hotel. She maintains a clean hotel with gated parking and 24-hour security on staff. It is not what we as North Americans would call posh but it is the Hilton-level accommodations of Gualaco, to be sure.

We would be taking our meals at the home of Digna and Santiago. Digna is a carer educator in Honduras and previously ran a restaurant on the main road that runs through Gualaco. They closed the eatery some time back and now they are “open” only for family and close friends when in town. Their home is beautiful and their hospitality even more so – it was like having momma cook for you three times a day. The kids in Gualaco have learned how to make homemade fireworks and as soon as the sun goes down (about 5:30pm) you hear them going off all over town. They have recently upgraded these makeshift noisemakers to fly up with a load whistle, much like a bottle rocket. The first night we witnessed this, my mind was drawn to the juxtaposition of how Disney would celebrate the day every evening at sundown with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fireworks (when we were in Anaheim, California for the SCAA convention a couple years ago). It seemed to be the same celebration of life to me there in that small mountain town.

Gualaco would be our basecamp, our HQ of operations for the next several days as we traveled back and forth to Linares and it served very well for these purposes. More than that though, Gualaco was an opportunity to experience and hopefully better understand life in Honduras in a small town (a small city by Honduran standards). As our presence and faces became more familiar around the place, it seemed to open itself up to us – by “it”, I mean its people – the reality of any community. A town is not buildings and streets. A town is a convergence of lives, a confluence of people that meld to make a qualitatively new flavor – not a patchwork but rather a tapestry.

What we now know as the Republic of Honduras has endured centuries of colonization and external influence by many different cultures. Honduras has seven indigenous peoples as well as Afro Hondurans (as in the Garifuna), but the largest group of the population is called “mestizo”: people whose lineage is indigenous mixed with European. On top of that, there are also substantial pockets of Middle Easterners, Chinese, German and many other peoples. In a way ( and I reserve the right to amend this opinion at a any time as I learn more), Honduras is a melting pot much like the US in some respects, woven into an often cohesive but sometimes partitioned whole. It all makes for an immense spread of cultures to learn about in order to have a good launching point for understanding the complex social and cultural structures of this amazing country. Gualaco was like a case study in this diversity, an aliquot portion of the whole.

Tegucigalpa, Honduras – population 3million+. It is not a safe town if you do not have somewhere to be. Political and gang graffiti color many buildings and I am only just beginning to learn what it means. I don’t know hectic traffic and neither do you if you have not been outside the States. Sure, Atlanta can be tough sometimes, but in Teguc, road signs and centerlines are merely suggestions, to be disregarded as gap allows. Our doors are locked, our windows up. Once we enter the Hotel Honduras Maya, we do not leave again until we are ready to leave town. This is just a one night layover because the sun would meet the mountains before we arrived in Gualaco and we cannot let that happen. Not here.

The hotel was palatial but oddly empty. A room at a place like this in Atlanta would cost $300 to $400 a night but here in Teguc, if you are on the right list you get it for $70. From the courtyard ringed with high walls and razor wire, it was cognitively dissonant to be faced with multiple pools and hot tubs and large patios set with heavy tables and chairs while gunfire echoed from the city. Sitting in the courtyard, this hotel could be in Beirut, Abu Dhabi, anywhere.

All this said, I know for certain that if we were to meet the people that inhabit this place, we would find the same hard-working and honest folks that we have come to know as Hondurans. Perhaps next time.