Day-to-Day

We often went to the local, dirty maze that was the city's main market to buy supplies. We'd walk through the dark and stinking tunnels to find a good deal on food. It was usually served in plastic bags with a fork; the pop coming in a baggie with a straw poking out. One of my favorites was a mix of rice, cabbage, with some sort of meat chunks and a salty, white sauce doused on everything. At the time, I didn't know what the locals called this, and unfortunately, I still don't.

I would often visit Hondutel to call home to talk to my parents. It took forever to connect a call. It required standing in line for a very long time, then giving your number to an operator and having her connect the call, at which time you were told to run into one of the 'sound-proof' booths to pick up the receiver that was your call. It could take a couple of hours. 

The city often encountered flash floods. Locals told me that these floods originated in the surrounding mountains after a hard rain - which was often. I was caught in them a few times and had to wade through the sewage back my hotel room or the little house. In doing this I once contracted ring worm on my eyelids. It was the weirdest thing. A local gringo from the US diagnosed me standing in line at the bank one day. I learned that ringworm is actually a fungus and not a worm at all. The pharmacist confirmed this and I was sold cream for it. It is still common today to have a pharmacist diagnose and suggest a medication.

The kids and I spent a lot of time walking around the town talking to other street kids - many of them older. The older kids received a lot less sympathy from the town and often kept quietly to themselves. They stuck to hanging out in certain areas that offered some sort of protection, mainly the front steps of a little church down by the coast. 

Speaking of the coastline, or what should have been a beach, it was not swimmable. I never found out why. It was most likely due to sewage. I remember that there was an incredibly long rickety pier that you could walk out on. To find a place to swim, you had to travel either towards Tela, or to Sambo Creek. Both places were considered dangerous, but one day we decided to visit Trujillo (past Sambo Creek). A girl from The Netherlands was visiting us. She was from Utrecht, I believe. I had met her in Guatemala. I can't recall how we kept in touch in order for her to visit me, as there was no internet or FB or anything but letters back then. Any letters I received was sent to general mail (poste resente) to whatever town I was in. Anyway, she came to visit and ended up going with us to Trujillo. Only two of the kids wanted to make the long, bumpy bus ride to this town. Alberto was one of the kids who wanted to go for a day trip.

La Vida Catracha!

Trying to get settled in that little cement house was no easy task. There was really nothing in the way of furniture. I had purchased a two-element, electric stove top and had a few pots. We found a old table and put a plastic sheet on it. We had water jugs, as then (as today), you could not drink the water. We also had a tape machine and played Selena's "Como la Flor" album incessantly. It had come out just prior to my travels in Central America and was incredibly popular. Her songs still bring back Honduran memories from 25 years ago. 

As for furnishing the house, things that are quite common today - fairly cheap and easy to obtain - like mattresses, covers, pillows or sheets were almost non-existent then, and cost an arm and a leg to buy. Colchones were definitely out of my price range. So, we went to the local wood mill to see if we could buy a few slabs of wood and blocks of concrete to lay on for beds. I didn't know how to haggle properly and ended up getting ripped off on the price. But, we now had bare slabs of wood to lay on. Our ambitious plan was to build bunk beds, but that was never to be.

One of my most vivid memories was when we contracted hair lice. I had gotten it from one the kids. In order to get rid of this plague, we all needed to be treated at the same time with de-licer and a haircut. This was much easier said than done. However, Giovanni stepped up and offered to cut everyone's hair after it was shampooed.  He was very confident about his styling skills. It was hilarious to watch the boy's looks of horror when he held a mirror up to their faces after he was finished. I snickered to myself; which I shouldn't have, because five minutes later I stepped on a nest of fire ants in the backyard. For anyone who has done this, they are sticky and hard to scrape off your skin. It was incredibly painful and the kids laughed as I ran around screaming knocking things over in the backyard.

The first few weeks were relatively calm, but there were still mishaps with the kids and some locals. My treasured radio was stolen one day and none of the kids would admit it. Later, Alberto was high on shoe glue and angry about something I don't remember and tried to spill boiling water on me. That incident scared the living daylights out of me. Some days, a local guy would stop by and knock on the door and tell me to leave town - usually this related to the shoe glue trade, which I did not tolerate.

Video of  Selena Quintanilla singing "Como la Flor"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwZTgDjRLM0

Organizing

I hadn't anticpated how hard it would be to organize a wild group of kids who were not used to being bossed around. For the most part they had survived for years without me or anyone else looking out for them. So yes, it was probably fun to follow me around in the beginning - the local gringa que se manda todo - the novelty soon wore off and they began to resist control. Even though they were small in stature, Honduras was a very male-centric country and full of machismo, so trying to coral these kids (who were for the most part all boys) and get them to take any sort of direction was a challenge indeed. It goes without saying that to survive on the street you must possess some ability to manipulate. Some were better than others at this. I sensed that a few of them were almost embarrassed to be on the street, while others were extremely proud of it. The younger kids often just took the lead of the older kids.

There are usually a lot of behind-the-scenes dynamics that take place between street kids and the towns they live in and this group was no exception. As a local traveler or tourist you wouldn't know it on the surface, but the kids often knew where to go for help, for something to eat, or somewhere to sleep. They knew who to talk to make a few centavos - like guarding parked cars, running an errand, hanging around food stalls or begging the local church. One of the boys, Mando, had a small job as a shoe shiner on the side. They were also the biggest purchasers of "resistol,"  which was shoe glue used for sniffing. It consisted yellow-ish looking glue smeared on little thin baggies. They got  got high on these. At that time in the 1990's, the men who sold them the resistol made extra  money on the side by supplying most of the street kids in town on an almost daily basis. Baggies were purchased as many as 20 or 30 times a day by the more addicted kids. So, having me in town - someone who was against the sale of it to the kids was definitely not a welcome development. I often got strange men knocking at the door who would tell me in a angry voices to mind my own business and go home. I knew what they were referring to by their rage - I was hindering the natural supply and demand of the "resistoleros." According to the Startribune (Minneapolis, MN 4 December 1995), "in 1995-96, there were an estimated 40 million to 50 million street children living in Latin America, and many of them became mentally and physically incapacitated  from this type of inhalant abuse."

Local Ceibeños ranged from mildly annoyed to outright indignation of my renting of the house on 12th Street, others thought it was merely peculiar and were completely indifferent to my efforts. Looking back on it, I can see why it would make them nervous. Street kids were such a problem already, and I was just bringing more around to a part of town where they hadn't previously been. Sometimes locals stopped by to knock and would ask me strange questions trying to feel out what was going on, I always told them the truth that I was trying to start a little non-profit working with street kids ... once, a local pastor stopped by and asked if I wanted to send some of the kids down for Bible study, of which I did. They arrived back shortly after telling me they had been kicked out for bad behavior. I was later lectured by this pastor for not ruling the situation with a stronger hand. But I was relatively young at that point, only 24, and wasn't quite sure about how far I could push the kids. 

By and large, the kids wanted to be there and the locals left us alone. 

School Days

After spending a few weeks hanging around different parts of La Ceiba with the kids, two things became really apparent; one, they all really missed their families (especially their mothers) and two; they all wanted to be in school learning something. We decided as a group to rent a house since at that time they were all living on the street, mainly sleeping in a group like an ant hill on church steps down by the beach. The cement house was cheap by today's standards - in the mid 90's it only cost about $90.00 a month - which I paid the owner in traveler's checks for a lease of 6 months. I was not wealthy, just a student backpacker with not much cash on hand. However, the street kids were excited, and once we went and purchased some school uniforms from local vendors in the rundown and dirty Ceiba market, there was no containing them. The next day I started the first of many visits to different schools in Ceiba to see if I could enroll the kids without papers, or having their parents involved. 

Honduras was (and is) a very bureaucratic country and workers really like to focus on missing paperwork, so the entire process was not easy. The school administrators were really concerned about who I was, and what I was doing there. I'll admit, looking back on it, it was a little strange and arrogant of me to think that I could just show up at a school with some abandoned kids and have them immediately accepted! They asked a lot of questions. Was I a social worker? An organization? A weirdo? A hippie? They wanted to know why I was doing this, especially since these kids were often considered very troublesome - like wild animals. After much haggling I was able to convince them that the kids would not cause any problems (not true, as I found out later), and that they just wanted to learn something (mainly to read). 

Most of the schools relented on allowing them to enroll after I showed them the uniforms and schools supplies that we had purchased .... on one condition, they said - that I somehow obtain the original copy of each child's birth certificate from the family for certification. This was not an easy task as many of the kids couldn't even remember where they lived, let alone how to get in touch with their mothers. Some had family members that were just as destitute as they were and had no records at all. 

I separated the kids into groups of 2 or 3 so they wouldn't form a clique at the schools and act like mini gangs and bother the teachers or other students. In the following days a few of the kids caused minor problems, but one child, nicknamed Mando, literally learned to read in a week. After that he was unstoppable, sounding out words and trying to read local newspapers that I often bought.

Photo of the first day of school in front of the Ceiba house.

Antonio, Chino, Giovanni, Darwin, Mando, Alberto Sadai, and Flaco - 1996

Street Kid Encounter (1996)

When I arrived in Honduras I had been looking for places to volunteer and had ended up in La Ceiba without much luck, organizations seemed few and far between at the time; larger organizations weren't interested in hiring volunteer backpackers and the smaller organizations were rare. I passed the days walking around trying to get to know the town and sitting in desolate seaside bars in the afternoon looking at a sea you could not swim in. I was too broke to pay to ferry over to one of the Bay Islands like Roatan or Utila, so I remained in La Ceiba. One afternoon, I was suddenly swarmed by a large group of dirty and high street kids between the ages of approximately 8 and 13 (although you could never assume ages though, as many children in Central America look much younger than they actually are). They stood around the table looking expectant and I thought, what the heck, and ordered them 4 very large plates of food; french fries, platanos, beans and rice. The food, however, disappeared from the air before the annoyed waiter even had a chance to set the plates on the table. Picked clean by grubby in just a few seconds. The plates lay empty on the table.

The kids again stood around the table staring at me. They were high on shoe glue, but even at that, their distinct personalities became apparent and some swiftly became emboldened describing what they 'needed' from me: a walkman, beer,  a tent, and of course, money (no coins only cash bills 'billetes'). The salesman of the group I would later find out was Giovanni. Beside him was a smallish child called 'Ocho' - why he was called eight, I to this day do not know. There was also an older boy of the group around age 14 named Mando. He carried shoeshine box strapped over his shoulder. There was also Darwin, who struck me as a trouble-maker, and Flaco (he was skinny and tall), and the beloved Chino. One child hung back a bit from the crowd looking self-conscious and shy, almost embarrassed, like a kid who knew better, one who had a good mother somewhere who raised him right and with some real manners. This unassuming and quiet person was Alberto Sadai Espinoza.

He was part of this sub-group of 6-8 kids who formed part of a larger group of about 20 kids, some of them quite a bit older who seemed to run things. The younger kids formed a tight-knit group and seemed to band together most days. At night they sought out the protection of the older kids often sleeping nearby them at various spots, mainly the steps of the local Catholic Church. Most of them came from other poorer parts of Honduras like El Progreso, Olanchito, La Esperanza - although La Ceiba was fairly poor itself. I think La Ceiba was a bit easier to handle than some of the other bigger cities like San Pedro Sula or Tegucigalpa. There was enough people and action to be helpful for a typical street kid, but not so big that it was unduly dangerous (although at times it still was).

They all carried little baggies of shoe glue that they sniffed  constantly to get high, including Alberto. 

The kids followed me around town the rest of the night and next few days. Everywhere I went of surrounded by an ocean of kids about 2 ft shorter than myself. Ironically, it made walking around the city safer as no one could get through this barrier of kids. Being Hondurans, they of course, walked around with a lot of swagger, proud to show off this gringa that they had found. They carried sticks and yelled at locals and tourists, but aside from that, they were so smart, funny and full of personality. They reminded me mini men full of machismo and bravado.

I decided to stay in La Ceiba for a few months and find out their stories, and also to understand if there was anything I could do to help them.