Comida? Ahora? No...

The volunteer teachers spent this past weekened at the beach, a nice final hurrah before school goes into full swing next Monday. We chose Triunfo de la Cruz, a small Garifuna town on the Caribbean coast of Honduras where there is nothing but beach, cabanas and reggae. This small town is entirely inhabited by “Garifunas,” black Carribeans that originate from the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras and coming to this small sleepy village it really feels like you are in a world entirely separate from the rest of Central America.

When we arrived, the town was completely desolate. Without a grocery store, we could only find one small “pulperia” (a small convenient store that is run out of the back of someone’s house). We asked the owner of the pulperia, a large woman with a hairnet, if there was anywhere we could get lunch as the prices for food at the cabanas where we were staying were astronomical at roughly $7/plate.

Having been here for a month, we no longer think in American dollars. Our minds have a shifted concept for the true value of goods and services, a necessary shift being that we are each allotted roughly $50/month for our food budget. We shoot for spending about $2/meal and generally have no problem doing so. Today, however, we weren’t so lucky.

The woman at the pulperia stood with here hands on her hips behind the bars that she built into her front door in order to give the perception of her house being a storefront. She looked at us as if we were delusional when we asked her about an open restaurant and replied, “comida? ahorra? No..” (food… now? No.) This is a response we have become accustomed to every Sunday when our entire town shuts down. We walk around town like orphan children trying to find a restaurant, let alone a grocery store that is open on Sundays.

Luckily, a 20 something Garifuna man in a tanktop overheard us asking for a restaurant and asked us what we wanted to eat.  Starving and sick of standing in the midday heat, we told him we would eat whatever we could find. He told us to follow him and he would find us food. 

These situations are the ones where you pause and think one of two things will happen right now, either this man will lead us into a back alley and rob us or  it is just another instance of someone going out of their way to help out a traveler in a foreign country and we will eat the best meal of our lives. It's always one or the other. Being that we were traveling in a mass gringo hurd, we were emboldened and decided that the latter was probably the more likely outcome.

We followed him  on his bike two blocks down the street, through someone’s backyard, under a clothesline strew with baby clothes, past a pile of burning trash, a few naked babies chasing baby chicks,  stepped around an old diaper and a large bucket of stagnant water to his uncle’s house on the beach. It looked like it was at one point a restaurant, but the broken plastic chairs and delapidaded huts  (evidence of the struggling tourist industry in Honduras since the military coup last year and that little global recession we all have been experiencing) made it unclear whether this restaurant was still functioning.

We sat around talking to our new, softspoken Garifuna guide while his uncle cooked over an open flame. Our hunger started to dissipate as we drank a cold beer and cooled off with the nice ocean breeze. An hour later, our host brought us each a whole fried fish and a pile of plantains.  The fish was salty and delicious. We shared the large plates at 70 lempiras a piece. Each paying the equivalent $3.50 for the beer and fish, we were content. Our lavish lunch took us a bit over budget, but we felt that we deserved it; we were on vacation after all.