Public Enemy #1

The perpetrator, hiding in the ruins of Copan.

My sister and dad came down to visit me last week. I was so excited to have them come and experience firsthand my funny life here. Char barely made it out of New York due to an impending snowstorm and arrived in San Pedro at 10pm on a Tuesday night. I hired Don Will, the father of one of our students and a man with a good heart who talks more trash about the people of Cofradia than anyone I know. After a 45 minute ride of listening to Don Will’s griping and giving the customary nods, trying to diffuse the shit-talking fest, Don Will and I arrived at the airport in his 25 year-old pickup truck of questionable functionality (one that he starts by hotwiring and he insists that he must keep it because new cars get stolen).

We arrived at 10pm and waited and waited as the rest of the passengers on her flight came through immigration. Finally Char came through, escorted by an immigration official, and I could tell by the look on her face that something was not right. I gave her a hug and said “what’s happening?” She explained  that her passport is due to expire in February and that Honduras has a law that doesn’t allow people to enter the country if their passport expires within 6 months. They told her that she couldn’t legally be here and they were going to send her on the first flight back (at 7am the next day).

We were furious! Why wasn’t this something that the airline told her in the states, or why didn’t American Airlines even catch this when she booked her flight online and put in her passport information? We pulled out all of the stops with immigration, I repeated “this is ridiculous” a bunch of times to the woman from American airlines.

This tactic was unsuccessful.

We wanted to talk to the American consulate to see if they could give her some sort of extension to her passport. The woman behind the desk was not very sympathetic and said she would have to leave on the first flight out. We pleaded with her to put her on a later flight so we could at least talk to the consulate and she said there was nothing that she could do, but to come to talk to the boss-man at 5am the next morning.

Frustrated, we realized that there was nothing that we could do at this point. I hugged Char, not knowing if I would see her again in Honduras and she went off with an immigration guard to a hotel that the airline was paying for. The female guard slept in her room while I went home and scrambled, emailing our program directors, my dad who I hoped would have some consulate and I called the American Consulate’s “Emergency Line”.  A US Marine Corps Sargeant answered the line and I stalled and said, “uh…. I am not sure if this is an appropriate emergency, but my sister is in San Pedro Sula, and is having problems with her passport etc...” The sergeant said, “Oh, bummer, we might be able to help, but can you do me a favor and call me right back. I picked up a phone in the other room and I can’t transfer you from here.” Um, ok, sure, I’ll call you right back. So I called him and he said, “Oh, ya, I remember now  let me transfer you”, and then he hung up on me. SHIT! I called him back, “hi, it’s me again.” “Oh, sorry sir, let me try again.” This time the call went through, rang twice and a tired old man cleared his throat and answered the phone, “Hello.” This was clearly his home phone. I apologized for waking him up and explained the situation. He was very reassuring and said, “I think we can help you, but I can’t do anything at this moment. Call us at 8am tomorrow.” A glimmer of hope.

Meanwhile, my dad called his embassy contacts and I got a list of peeps from our BECA program director. Then I went to bed. It was 1 am. While this was going on, Char was shuttled to a hotel near the airport and accompanied by a female Immigration guard who slept at the hotel with her… in the bed next to her. Char then woke up at 4:30am and went back to the airport. She pleaded with the “Jefe”

to move her flight back to 1pm so she could have an opportunity to speak with the embassy. He finally gave in at 8am she called the embassy.

Fast forward to fourteen hours later, 10 hours of riding buses to and back from the capital city of Tegucigalpa, a purchase of a Honduran cellphone, a fire-drill in the embassy that almost made getting a new passport impossible, a frantic state of running around Teguce in attempts to find an ATM because their credit card machine was down and a teller that would only accept exact change and Char made it to my doorstep with a new passport.

While this was the most ridiculous day for sis, (one filled with stress, little sleep, and reeking with bureaucracy) when all was said and done, Char got into Honduras, my dad joined her  and we had a really fun couple of days together. Plus, Char became really close with the immigration guard that slept in her room (I hear they had great pillow talk) and the guard actually ended up helping her out a lot to make this whole thing work out. She let her use her cell phone, pleaded with her boss, and helped Char buy a Honduran phone for herself. Char won her over, no doubt. This was clear when I went to the airport to pick up Char’s bag for her,  and I needed to get into a secure area and I shouldn’t have been able to do so being that I wasn’t a passenger. But Char’s guard, gave me her security badge, gave a wink to her friend in security and shuffled me on through the employee entrance. This surely would not have happened if TSA were in control of the situation.

At the end of all of this, though, I am left thinking…. Really, Honduras? Really? Why would a small, blonde, Jewish girl from New York City want to be sneaking into your country? Or why would anyone for that matter. Give us a goddamned break.

Enjoy some pictures of my dad and sister’s stay with me…

A free woman, enjoying coffee in Copan.

Dad taught a seminar for the teachers.

And he did a little magic.

Char and I with some friends at snacktime.

Drama workshop!

Drama workshop  #2!

Fam.

Copan Ruinas.

Mom paid a visit.

A loss for SJBS

It was a difficult week for the SJBS community. Miss Sandra, one of the Honduran teachers at our school, has been very sick for the majority of the year. None of the American teachers really knew what her condition was but we believe that it was complications with lupus. She teaches the preschool and kindergarteners and has two boys who are in our 7^th and 8^th grade class.  On Friday afternoon,  when we were playing our weekly soccer game, Andrea,our Program Administrator gathered us around and told us she had news. In the past when we had uncalled meetings like this it was when our 2^nd grade teacher was leaving, and when the teachers from the other school were robbed at gunpoint, so these types of meetings make us nervous.

She told us that Miss Sandra was due to get surgery today and that she had died before the surgery. We were shocked. We all knew that she was sick and having troubles, but none of us knew the extent of her illness.

My heart collapsed for her boys. They are very attached to her, are behind others in their class in terms of individuation and are not fully formed people yet.

I was the same age as Andres (8^th grade) when my mom was diagnosed. This experience brought back so many memories of that time. Sitting in the hospital doing my homework and receiving that news, failing to understand or believe it. Trying to live a normal 8^th grade life when I was facing these huge fears and circumstances that were larger than I could take in.

What hit me the hardest with the news is knowing the different ways that they are going to have to cope with this loss. There is so much that they aren’t even aware of yet. All of the “firsts” that they are going to have to face in the next year:  the first birthday without mom, the first time that they will go to call her cell phone number out of habit, the first time that they will wake up, forget that she is gone and then remember. They don’t know that their whole family dynamics are going to change, or that they will never actually be able to believe fully believe that she is gone, that the ache will lessen, but it will always be there, that the grief becomes less angry, less painful, and that they will change their relationship with it and the way in which they process it, but that it never really goes away. I don’t want them to have to know that.

We went to the funeral the next day. We loaded into a school bus with some of the Honduran  teachers and some of the SJBS families and rode to the cemetery where she was to be buried. The cemetery was unlike any that I had been to. It was much less clean, much less tranquil than the cemeteries that we know, there were cows grazing and walking over the graves and the grounds were unkept  and seemed more like a landfill than a cemetery. Her plot was in the very back of the cemetery, surrounded by dense brush, that they would most likely cut away later as the cemetery would expand. It was hot and we stood with a group of maybe 50 Hondurans crying as we sweat.

The service was short. A few prayers from a priest,  a eulogy from our principle, a hymn sung by one of the mothers of our students, and a few words from Sandra’s brother. Then they started the burial. The mound of dirt that they were shoveling into the grave was filled with plastic bags, aluminum cans and other items of trash that had accumulated layer upon layer over the years. It was really difficult to watch Placing that dirt on a grave felt so far from sacred.  I remembered how hard it was watching my mother’s casket lowered into the earth, and couldn’t imagine what it would have felt like to see her covered in dirt filled with trash. I would have been so angry. It didn’t seem to affect the Hondurans, though. I can only think that it is so common in this country to see trash in the earth here that they don’t even see it anymore; in the same way that I don’t really notice anymore the piles of trash along the route that I walk everyday to school.

We hugged our two students and told them that we were here for them, feeling like we wanted to do more, but knowing that there wasn’t anything else that we could do.

When we got to school on Monday, we honored Miss Sandra at actos civicos (flag salute) and held moments of silence for her in all of our classes. On Tuesday, when I arrived at school, Astrid, a 3 yr old who is the cutest thing ever and is the daughter  of one of the lunch ladies told me in her little voice that Grace’s husband (Grace is our head lunchlady) was murdered the night before. Thinking that Astrid got confused with her words, I asked our Andrea, our administrator, about what she told me and found it to be true. The man who was murdered is also the son of a 6^th grade boy in my drama club.

With this news, the whole BECA team felt we were kicked when we were already down. It was so difficult to process both tragedies at once. The students were also somber, but were functioning just fine. I have never in my life known someone who has been murdered, but it is not so uncommon here. I have at least seven students who have parents or siblings who have died early or been killed. Death is as normal as birth here. It seems to leave Hondurans with a different relationship with death.

After this experience, I am left wondering if the normalcy of death here makes the way that they experience grief any less severe.  As we can only truly know our own experiences, I  guess I will never know.  Although this was an incredibly hard week, it was a very important experience. While I stood surrounded by Hondurans in the baking sun, sweating and crying, with a hand on Andres and Gabriel’s shoulder, I felt for the first time in Cofradia that I was not an “other.”  I felt like I was part of a community, grieving together.