Holy Week is over and true summer has begun in Honduras; the ground is dry, the sky is cloudless, and the temperature peaks around 103 Fahrenheit every day. The weeks of Lent seemed to pass quickly, with no seasonal changes to mark the passing of time. I miss the seasons more than ever, especially the mild Kentucky spring and the blooms of the dogwoods and redbuds.
My roommate left unexpectedly last week after accepting a new job offer. I am one of only two American volunteers left in this program – the other is Anna, who lives down the hall from me. We are entering the last quarter of the school year. I feel some relief as I look forward to my return flight in June, especially during these days of intolerable heat and frequent power outages.
During Holy Week, I got a break from Cofradía by traveling with a group of “missionaries” from the central Cofradía parish to visit the villages, or aldeas, that populate the Merendón mountains. They called us missionaries, but we weren’t really doing any evangelizing, only helping out in the churches of the more isolated villages. I spent most of the time in an aldea called Mayén, the childhood home of my friend Xiomara. Much of her family still lives there, and I stayed with them as I helped with the missionary activities: reading and singing in Mass, organizing the Easter celebrations, and visiting the houses and homesteads.
The people of Mayén are almost all farmers, or campesinos, living off the crops they grow and the little profit they make selling the excess. In the last few years, they have gained access to more modern amenities; their houses have electricity and running water, though the system is somewhat crude and unreliable. The roads are more accessible, so some people commute to Cofradía for work. They live hard lives on the edge of poverty, and yet the warmth and kindness of that community, the way they welcomed me and cared for me during my stay, was like nothing else I’ve experienced in Honduras or the US.
I want to start by describing my first visit to Mayén, before I came with the missionaries.
Holy Week began with Palm Sunday, celebrating the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Early in the morning, we gathered for the procession at the top of the road that enters Cofradía from the highway. From there we walked through the blocked-off streets to the gates of the church, singing all the way. Compared to Americans, Hondurans turn out in much greater numbers and with greater enthusiasm for religious festivals. It was thrilling to march in the middle of a crowd several hundred people strong, with the air around us buzzing with songs and joy that was almost tangible. We all carried wide-leafed palm branches, freshly green and glossy, many braided or tied up with bunches of flowers. It looked as if a small forest was descending on the church as we entered, crowding the pews and cramming ourselves into the space between aisles and along the walls.
After mass and a quick lunch at Xiomara’s house, they asked me if I wanted to meet Xiomara’s grandmother. I had heard about We started up a steep, winding road, riding in the back of a pickup truck that jolted us around as it crossed dry riverbeds and skirted the edges of cliffs. As the forest around us became denser, Xiomara pointed out many landmarks of her childhood. As we sped around a sharp bend in the road, she pointed to a small building some hundred feet below us, almost hidden among the trees – it was the school she attended until sixth grade. After that, she left home when she was fifteen to find work in a cigar factory, hoping to support her mother and disabled father. Later, I learned that the children of Mayén still walk between the village and that same one-room schoolhouse, staffed by a single teacher for all six grades. Once they graduate from sixth grade, the last grade of mandatory education in Honduras, they must leave to find work or to continue their education.
At the top of the mountain, the lowest in a series of ridges that stretched away north, we reached her grandmother’s house, a simple two-room structure with walls of wooden planks and a rusted tin roof. Mama Sara, as Xiomara called her, welcomed us inside. She was a small, wrinkled woman with a brisk energy. She was quiet compared to her chatty family, and bright, thoughtful eyes shone from the deep hollows of her face. Her house was divided in two by an open-air passageway down the center. We gathered in the kitchen, a crowded room with a long table and the hornilla, a type of stone oven common in Honduras. A fire is lit on the inside of the hornilla and food is cooked on a sheet of metal laid over the top. Against the wall was a table with an apparatus used for grinding corn, which I On the walls hung a variety of vegetables, cooking utensils, and small machetes.
Xiomara and her girls showed me around; the hens and their chicks, the sugarcane and cacao trees, the flowering succulents in pots around the back stoop, and the little green church at the far side of the clearing with its cemetery I had at first mistaken for a garden. Bianca and I hunted in the grass for the tiny ferns that close when you touch them. Belén began to chant, “Caña, caña!” until one of her uncles took his machete and began to cut sugarcane for us. We pulled chairs into the shade of the patio and sat in a circle, drinking coffee and chewing the sugarcane.
Two of Mama Sara’s sons, Fredy and Rubén, began asking me questions; how had I learned Spanish? Why did I come to Honduras? Rubén nodded solemnly when I explained that I worked for an NGO. “You have the vocation for social work,” he told me. “I know because I have it, too.” He told me he was part of the social action committee at church. We talked about some of the social and economic problems they grappled with, such as the low wages of factory workers, and the plight of migrants passing through Honduras from other countries. Fredy, who served as the deacon of Mayen’s church, answered some of my questions about agriculture and Honduran campesinos’ struggles for land rights. I was astonished to hear these men from an isolated mountain village speak with so much empathy and social awareness, something I rarely heard in Cofradía.
I was curious to see the family’s finca, so Edwin took me on the back of his motorcycle. We met up with Rubén, who led us through the barbed-wire gate to an old wooden shed built by his grandfather. I might not have been able to distinguish the cultivated land from the forest around it, except for the wire fence that closed it in. Only the rows of corn and beans were familiar to me, but other crops extended in every direction; bananas, plantains, limes, avocados, coffee, passionfruit, almonds, custard apples, sapotes, and fruits and vegetables I had never heard of. As we walked under the trees, Rubén plucked leaves that smelled of anise or peppercorn for me to crush in my hands, explaining their medicinal value or the flavor they give to dishes. He apologized that I was seeing the finca during the dry season, assuring me that in winter (the wet season) it was much more impressive. As it was, I was enchanted. Smelling the pine trees, listening to the soft crunch of leaves under our feet and the soprano chirping of insects, I felt transported back home to Kentucky, and yet in another world altogether.
That evening we ate chicken stew, boiled green plantains fresh from the finca, beans from the winter harvest, and tortillas from corn I helped to grind. Dessert was more coffee and some of the sweet bread Xiomara had brought from town.
When I left Mayén that night, I was already hoping for the opportunity to return soon – which I got only two days later!
To be continued . . .
