Before the Spaniards came, the indigenous peoples of the Americas used to pray to the gods of rain. The Aztecs worshipped the fanged god, Tlaloc, and the Mayans, the oldest inhabitants of Honduras, prayed to Chaac. These gods were fierce and demanding, often requiring animal or even human sacrifices before they would open the heavens and bless their people with life-giving rain. I don’t think I ever understood what it meant to pray for rain until these last few months. Honduras is going through extreme climate conditions right now: air pollution, a prolonged drought, and historically high temperatures. The rainy season was supposed to begin at the start of May, but we haven’t seen a drop in two months. As I’m sitting in my apartment, the heat index outside is around 120 Fahrenheit. The power just came back on after the second outage of the day, and our water has been shut off since last night.
There is a cap of smoke hanging over Honduras, trapping and intensifying the heat. The smoke is residue from the forest fires we experienced over the last four months. In April, I used to see them from my balcony, glowing red hilltops to the northeast, in the direction of San Pedro Sula. They were too far away to seem like a direct danger, but watching them burn night after night was unsettling. According to the news, more than 200,000 hectares – close to 500,000 acres – of forest have burned. Honduras’s firefighters do not have the numbers or the technical equipment needed to scale the inaccessible mountain passes and contain these wildfires. I live in the Sula Valley, surrounded by mountains, but lately their peaks are invisible, entirely concealed behind the thick, grimy veil of smoke. The World Health Organization is warning that air pollution has reached hazardous levels over the entire country.
The high temperatures have led to overheating of transformers and power plants. Power and water outages are frequent and can last hours or days. It’s the most extreme climate event I’ve ever lived through. My roommate and I are doing alright, although the heat is so exhausting I generally don’t go out after school and tutoring. On nights with no power, we use headlamps for light and wet towels to cool off, and I let my tiny battery fan run all night on my bedside table.
I have been struggling to find the motivation to write. This blog has far fewer posts than I had imagined it would by now. My departure date is coming up fast: next week is the final week of exams at school, and then I will have two more weeks to say goodbye before flying back to the US. Although I have been lethargic and unmotivated from the heat, the month had a few highlights. I went up to the mountains a few times, including a visit to Mayén for Mother’s Day – Mama Sara’s new house has now been completed and painted bright blue, and she seems very happy in it.
I also visited my friend Yilia at the public school where she teaches kindergarten. I sometimes complain about the lack of resources at my school – no glass on the windows, no colored printing, etc. – but Yilia’s school is like another world. The row of square cement-brick classrooms sits inside an unkempt courtyard where dogs and chickens roam freely. Most classrooms have over forty students, but lack seats and desks for all of them. On days of unbearable heat, they have to make do with a single fan mounted on one wall to circulate the air. The students buy bagged drinking water from a small store at the corner of the schoolyard. Yilia told me many don’t bring money and the teachers have to buy water for them. The kids were all smiles, shouts, and eager hugs, thrilled to have a visitor, but as they crowded around me I could see clearly the marks of their poverty; they looked completely different from the kids at my private school in their clean bright uniforms and neatly styled hair. I was shocked to learn that the government invests little to nothing in public schools beyond paying teachers’ salaries. Construction and upkeep of school infrastructure, teaching materials, and student support services; all of these must be fundraised and paid for by the local community.
For a break from Cofradía, I went to an orchestra concert in San Pedro Sula. They featured a seventeen-year-old piano prodigy who played some of my favorite Romantic repertoire. After making a lucky acquaintance with a friend of the conductor, I got to meet the musicians and chat with them briefly after the concert. I was delighted to meet Hondurans who were part of an international music scene. It was frustrating, though, to see the wealth and opulence on display by San Pedro Sula’s upper class in contrast with the extreme poverty I witness every day in Cofradía. Honduras, like many developing countries, is held back by an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Money and power are concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy families, and nepotism controls who receives all the most important government appointments. There isn’t much opportunity for upward mobility because of how little the government invests in education and social services.
I also spent more time reading this month. I recently finished The Long Honduran Night by Dana Frank, an American journalist who spent years lobbying Congress and advocating for human rights in Honduras. The referenced “Honduran night” refers to a period of brutal political repression that took place after the 2009 military coup. The book relates how a succession of post-coup administrations in the 2010s trapped Honduras in a mire of crime and corruption. The man chiefly responsible for this is Juan Orlando Hernandez, who served as president from 2014 to 2022, though many would characterize him as more dictator than president. During his presidency, he was supported and praised by both the Obama and Trump administrations, which is ironic because he was just indicted in a US court for conspiring to traffic narcotics.
It is deeply troubling to find out the role the US has played in supporting corrupt leaders and justifying the rigged elections that took place after the coup. The story reads like a continuation of Cold War-era politics. In order to oppose a left-leaning government suspected of communist sympathies, the US throws support behind a conservative challenger. This is why the US did not protest the illegal removal of ex-President Zelaya in the 2009 coup. Instead, they supported Hernandez’s rise to power as he militarized the police, protected drug cartels while pretending to fight them, committed terrible human rights abuses, and failed to protect the rights of Indigenous landowners and small farmers. By turning a blind eye, the US became complicit in this brutality. This story is by no means unique to Honduras, but is a recurring pattern in US involvement in Latin America.
My next book is Eduardo Galeano’s classic, Open Veins of Latin America, a loan from my roommate. This book delves into the history of Latin America and its relations with European and North American powers over the last five centuries. So far, it is very dense reading, but I’m excited to get through it!
Part two of my week in Mayén is coming soon. Stay tuned!
