Pros and cons of helping Honduras
Pink. Yellow. Green. Blue. Virtually the entire American Airlines flight going to San Pedro Sula in Honduras was clad in color-coordinated T-shirts, each representing a group doing good in the Central American country. Medical missionaries from South Carolina. College students from the Northeast. Church groups of kids, parents and pastors from across the United States, including ours from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Coral Gables, Fla.
In the six summers, I’ve traveled with my family to San Pedro Sula to volunteer at Nuestras Pequenas Rosas (Our Little Roses), a home and school for abused, orphaned and abandoned Honduran girls, there has never been an empty seat on the planes. A handful of the passengers are Hondurans, the rest are U.S. citizens who are building homes and schools, running clinics, distributing food and bonding with the Honduran people.
Yet with Honduras’ percapita murder rate topping the worldwide charts in 2010 — coupled with the Peace Corps’ decision to leave the country in December after one of its volunteers was shot in the leg in an armed robbery in San Pedro Sula — many are worried about the impact the violence will have on their work.
“Just yesterday a supporter of Honduras called me, worried that Honduras is becoming a place in crisis. They wanted to know how we are seeing the situation,” said Oscar Castaneda, vice president of the Americas program for Heifer International, the global nonprofit that has been working in Honduras for 40 years.
His take: The violence is primarily between gang members and drug cartels, who’ve moved in from Mexico. That said, Heifer avoids driving at night and holds meetings in villages, not cities.
As the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — after Haiti — Honduras relies heavily on humanitarian groups. Volunteer medical professionals treat people who’ve never been to a doctor. Groups like Food for the Poor in Coconut Creek, Fla., build homes for families who’ve never lived in anything but a shack with a rusted metal roof. And in places like Nuestras Pequenas Rosas, volunteers read, sing, bake cookies, make pizzas and build bonds with the girls over a lifetime, encouraging them in school and helping pay for their college educations — in a country where two out of three people in 2010 lived below the poverty line.
Heifer goes to Honduras 12 to 15 times a year, bringing small groups of volunteers on each trip. In addition to doing community service projects, Heifer, whose largest Central American program is in Honduras, takes groups to organic coffee plantations and honey cooperatives to raise awareness about the global food chain.
Heifer has no plans to pull out of Honduras; it has a group heading to Teguci- galpa, the capital, in February. Heifer, he noted, worked in Guatemala throughout its three-decade civil war, which ended in the mid-1990s. It also worked through the coup of 2009 when the military forced then-honduras’ President Manuel Zelaya into exile at gunpoint.
When the coup made headlines in June 2009, the impact was immediate.
“It was a Sunday morning and I was coming out of church when I got this phone call. It was from the group that I was about to pick up at the airport. They called to tell me they were canceling, that they were concerned about the State Department issuing a travel warning,” said Diana Frade, the Miami founder and executive director of Nuestras Pequenas Roses.
For the next six months — a period normally booked with back-to-back groups — no one came.
“The girls were very, very sad,” said Frade, who founded the home in 1988. “The groups are their extended family. They spent half of the year without visitors.”
Frade, the wife of the Rev. Leo Frade, the Episcopal bishop of Southeast Florida, theorized the Peace Corps left because of poor diplomatic relations stemming from the Zelaya coup.
Kristina Edmunson, a Peace Corps spokeswoman in Washington, said there were a number of issues that led the Peace Corps to pull its 158 volunteers, including “the safety and security of our volunteers on the ground.”