Too broke, or too disorganized, to keep the national gallery open

The Honduran National Gallery of Art locked its doors this week.

The government hasn’t provided any money since January. Staff haven’t been paid since November. They finally quit coming to work, and now management has chained the doors and started packing away some of the works.

The gallery is good. We visited, looking to kill time in Tegucigalpa, the capital, and liked it.

It’s in a 450-year old convent, a beautiful two-storey building with an open courtyard. There are about six galleries, and they cover art in Honduras from pre-Columbian carvings, through the religious art of the Spanish era and into the contemporary scene. There is a nice auditorium, and gardens in the courtyard.

The displays are basic, but that adds to the power of some work, especially the religious paintings and spectacular silver from the colonial-era churches.

I gave it a glowing review on TripAdvisor.

It’s a bad sign, I think, when a government can’t make the budgeted payments to the national gallery. It’s not even big money; gallery managers say $45,000 would be enough to open the doors and get through the next four months. The total annual budget is about $135,000.

None of this is surprising. Stories of government employees going unpaid for months - teachers, health workers, anyone - are regular features in the newspapers. Sometimes, it seems the government simply can’t get its act together to issue the cheques. Sometimes there is no money. (Sometimes, I’m sure, the employees’ claims are bogus.)

What’s surprising, for a North American, is that people keeping showing up for work for months without getting paid.

Mostly, that’s what happens when people really need a job and have no other prospects. You keep on heading into work, hoping some day that you’ll get some of that back pay and the regular wages will start flowing. Why not? There is nothing much else to do.

But it might also reflect a cultural value of just accepting life’s blows and keeping on. (Written down, that looks practically noble; in practice, it look more like learned helplessness.)

The failure to pay people also illustrates another problem. Hondurans talk a lot about ‘impunidad’ - the ability of some people to ignore laws without consequences. 

Honduras has a fine set of laws and regulations. They just aren’t enforced.

There are legal minimum wages, for example, based on the nature of work and size and location of company. But employers can ignore them without fear of consequences. Or they can simply refuse to pay people for months at a time.

It’s new to be in a land where the government doesn’t have the money to pay the bills. Canadian governments, even in deficit years, can borrow whatever they need to cover budgeted costs.

The Honduras government can’t do that. Tax exemptions and evasion are widespread, so revenues are low. The domestic borrowing market has been tapped out, and foreign borrowing is difficult and interest rates are high. Some months, there just isn’t enough money to cover costs, or pay salaries. And, eventually, people get fed up.

A national art gallery isn’t essential. (Though Tegucigalpa has few attractions for visitors - a couple of other museums, a great nearby national park. The gallery could be a draw. And it is a refuge just a few blocks from the central square and the quite ratty downtown - the neglected office buildings call up the end years of the Soviet bloc.)

Government could even have decided to close the gallery’s doors to save money in tough times.

But it didn’t. The Finance Ministry just failed to send the promised money, month after month.

And, finally, the national gallery closed its doors, for who knows how long.

Four reasons the Liberals won, and the NDP lost

So why did the NDP lead in the polls evaporate?

Sure, the $17 million in taxpayers’ money spent promoting the Liberals was a factor, as were the negative ads. 

From far away, I’d offer four more basic reasons.

Christy Clark and the Liberals ran a tidy campaign with a simple message. The Liberals, they said, would manage the economy better and protect jobs. They gave people something to vote for, in a vague and not particularly credible way.

They also ran gave people reasons not to vote for the NDP, arguing Adrian Dix was at best an unknown quantity and the party platform unclear. (And talking a lot of rubbish about the NDP as well.)

Adrian Dix and the New Democrats did not give people something to vote for. There was a platform, of course, and excellent positions on some issues, like banning corporate and union donations. But by the end of the campaign, the main message seemed to be that the New Democrats would be careful. That’s a laudable quality. But it’s not a substitute for a vision of what B.C. would be like in four years, or 10 years.

And the New Democrats failed to give people reasons not to vote for the Liberals. It’s welcome that the party pledged to avoid the kind of slimy attack ads that too often pollute politics. (Like the ones the Liberals used against Dix and Cummins.)

But it would have been completely legitimate to suggest that voters should be suspicious of the Liberal campaign, citing the example of the HST and the 2009 pre-election budget that turned out to be fiction. It would be just as legitimate to talk about the Basi-Virk payment, or growing secrecy, or attempts to limit the role of independent watchdogs like the auditor general and the representative for children and youth, or cronyism. Or the current budget, which falls somewhere between dubious and bogus.

Of course, everything is clear after the fact. And, as it said on a coffee mug a reporter gave me in my days as an editor, ‘Everything is easy for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.’

Julia the banana seller: Putting a face to Honduras' poor

Julia Pérez Alvarado and part of her large family

On a good day, Julia Pérez Alvarado makes about $6 selling bananas in Tegucigalpa neighbourhoods. Not much for a single mom with eight children.

But pretty typical for the way many, or most, Hondurans scratch out a subsistence living. In fact, Alvarado’s take on good days is pretty typical wage for a laborer or household worker. 

La Tribuna has been doing regular stories on poor people around the city.

For me, they’re great. It feels pushy to start grilling strangers about their lives in bad Spanish. 

But I’ve been curious about the women who sell bananas outside the market in Copan, crouching on the sidewalk.

Statistics are important. This week, the Honduran national statistic’s agency reported 69 per cent of Hondurans live in poverty. About 24 per cent survive on less than $1 a day.

People’s stories are important too.

More children? 'Only God knows'

Alvarado’s business model is simple, according to the paper. She leaves her house - a shack really - at 5 a.m. each morning and walks an hour to a largish market. She buys 200 minimos - a variety of small bananas - for about $4, or two cents each. Then she walks kilometres selling them door-to-door in neighbourhoods for five cents each. (Which is the same as I pay at the market.)

Is she sells out, she makes $6. If she doesn’t sell at least 80 bananas, she loses money.

At 41, she has eight children, the oldest 23. She left her husband because he was jealous and beat here, she told La Tribuna, and a second man in her life turned out to be a louse.

“Men today don’t work, they go into the streets and find other women,” she said. “They stay for a while then they rush away  and don’t help me in anyway.”

Based on conversations with Hondurans, that seem a problem. About 34 per cent of households are headed by a single woman. That’s much greater than in Canada (about 13 per cent), and there is no structure for child support or safety net. 

You can survive on $6 a day, even with a family. The print edition of La Tribuna showed Alvarado’s house, which was two rooms, cobbled together out of sticks and corrugated tin, likely squatting on the land. So her housing is free

 Food, even for all those kids, would be manageable, at least in terms of enough calories (though not remotely adequate for nutrition). Tortillas are cheap - about five cents each - and filling. Beans are 30 cents a pound and rice about 60 cents. (Beans, corn tortillas and rice make up about 60 per cent of the calories consumed in a typical Honduran diet.) 

The problem is that people living that way are always on the edge of disaster. If Alvarado wrenches her knee and can’t walk to the market, or someone robs their house or the school demands kids pay fees, then things fall apart. (Alvarado told La Tribuna all her children in school, some at night and some in the day. That doesn’t actually guarantee they’re learning much.)

There is an obvious question. Why would anyone have eight children without any ability to provide for them? The online comments on the article included some pretty forceful expressions of the same question.

Religion, partly. The interviewer asked Alvarado if she was going to have more children. “I don’t know,” she said. “Only God knows that.” (Though she added “je, je, je,” which often means a person is joking.)

About half the population say they are Roman Catholic. That church says members can’t use any birth control measure except abstinence when women are most likely to conceive. That’s the equivalent of no effective birth control for poor people with little education. 

Religion aside,  there are issues of access and education. About one-quarter of births are to women under 18, a rate 26 per cent higher than the average for the region. A 2008 HDR report on Honduras found 46 per cent of first-time teen mothers had no education.

But even with no children, for many - maybe most - Hondurans, poverty is just reality, and disaster just one piece of bad luck away.

Speaking Spanish, and the challenge of criticism

It’s tough to serve up criticism in a second language.

Or it is for for me. I spent a day last week working with four other people on a funding proposal for a Honduran NGO. In Spanish. 

Luckily, one woman was making notes on her computer, which were projected on a screen in the meeting room. Instead of struggling to grasp spoken comments, I could read them. My personal effectiveness increased tenfold. (Another occasion to give heartfelt thanks for technology.)

Responding still wasn’t easy. While meetings leave me feeling like my head will explode, there is now a point - maybe 45 minutes in - when something in my brain clicks into Spanish mode. (That fades, like a superpower granted by a genie. By the six-hour mark, the simplest sentences are hard to decode.)

More importantly, I am prepared to sound stupid in order to participate.

That’s probably a triumph of ego. I don’t like to sound dumb in front of other people, or course. But, even more, I can’t resist offering ideas and comments. (The Honduran women from the development agency were encouraging, which helped.)

It’s a weird experience. I was good at meetings in Canada. I had insights, and usually an idea of the optimum outcome. I could help win support for good ideas, and might have even been a little pushy. Here, I am a struggling, well-intentioned amateur.

The hardest thing, I have realized, is to offer criticism. It’s difficult in a first language - look at how useless most managers are at offering guidance to employees on their job performance.

But it’s really challenging in a second language. In the meeting, the group came up with a lamish statement of the objectives for the project. 

In English, I could say ‘what a great start, let’s see what we can do to make it even better.’ 

In Spanish, all I could say was “That’s very general and generic. We need to be more specific about how the project will bring the changes the funder wants.” It sounded judgmental even to me. (I don’t know why I felt the need to criticize the main objective as both general and generic. Either might have sufficed.)

When we offer criticism in our first language, it’s all about tone. We make people think the new ideas are actually their own, or create an imaginary consensus, or make an overwhelming case.

None of that is possible when you’re struggling to come up with a semi-coherent sentence. All subtleties are lost. 

It’s not just a problem in meetings. Our organization uses one taxi driver in Tegucigalpa to keep everyone safe. (We walk in Tegus, in the daytime and carrying nothing that would attract bad guys. But it is a dangerous city.)

He's great. Mostly. But if you call him, he will always say he is 10 minutes away. Then he doesn’t show up for an hour, which can be discouraging at the end of a difficult day.

After two one-hour late pickups at the end of the working day last week, I wanted to complain to him and and the staff who rely on him. I couldn’t judge how harsh I was being in my challenged Spanish - a pushover, or a crabby, time-obsessed gringo?

My Spanish efforts are already producing benefits. Hondurans like it when you can speak their language, even badly. And I’ve seen the weight lift off store staff when they realize I can communicate and they don’t have to launch into a stressful, crazed version of charades with yet another gringo.

I’m sure learning a new language is helping my brain.

I’m also learning a lot about humility and what it’s like to be scrabbling to make your voice heard. And I’m wondering how many great insights have been lost because people haven’t been given the space and time to explain them.

Photo radar and taxes and the power of political myths

It’s interesting the way political orthodoxy emerges, without much real evidence.

Take two examples - photo radar and irrational tax phobia.

Photo radar, it was clear during the leaders’ debate, is seen as political poison. Asked about reinstating it, all four leaders said  no.

The evidence from around the world is conclusive - photo radar reduces crashes and health care costs and saves lives. In the six years that B.C. had photo radar, road deaths averaged 408 annually. In the previous six years, an average 534 people died on the roads. That’s 126 families spared the death of a loved one each year. (You can read more stats here.)

And the politicians can’t claim they’re reflecting the will of the people. A 2007 poll for the Canada Safety Council found 75 per cent of British Columbians supported photo radar on the highways - and 90 per cent in school zones.

So why the fear about an evidence-based public policy move - one accepted in Alberta? Maybe the opponents are considered passionate enough that they’re not worth riling. Maybe the politicians have bought into a myth of public opposition.

The more dramatic and damaging myth is around taxes.

Somehow, politicians have reached an agreement that they have to pretend all taxes are bad. If they plan increases, they offer elaborate apologies.

But the public isn’t stupid. Government services cost money, and have to be paid for. If you want a hospital bed, or a road, or a school for your children, then taxes have to be collected.

Further, people have indicated they’re willing to pay more for better services from government, just as they are in any other area of their life. A B.C. poll several years ago found 60 per cent of residents would pay more in property taxes to improve services. 

And an April poll for the Roundtable of Community Social Services of BC found 53 per cent of British Columbians would pay higher taxes to ensure better services in their community.

There is an important qualifier there - more money in return for better services. Not for convention centre or fast ferry overruns, or endless re-orgs or government advertising.

Still, it’s odd that politicians have largely accepted the myth that citizens reject all taxation, and allowed it to shape their policies and the public debate.

Sinking in a sea of garbage

Tegucigalpa floods: Take hills, garbage-blocked ditches and drains, add rain

I’ve been wondering about garbage-per-kilometre as a development indicator, along with all the formal measures like stunted children and GINI indexes and poverty rates.

Maybe when a society gets a handle on garbage, it’s reached some sort of turning point.

If so, Honduras has a long way to go.

Early this year, slick new recycling containers sprouted on the streets in Copan Ruinas. We saw them in Tela too, so it must be some sort of national program. They had their own little concrete pads and were abut four-feet tall tall and slender, with ad posters for banks or tourist sites on two sides. There was an opening on each end, and signs said one was for organic waste, and the other for plastic, cans, glass and cardboard.

Pretty darned green. Except if you looked inside, all the trash dropped into one open area. It was a really fancy and, it turned out, easily vandalized garbage pail.

That’s not surprising.

The “Don’t Be a Litterbug” stuff hasn’t caught on down here. When you ride the buses, people finish their snack or pop and toss the garbage out the window without a thought. (If the window is broken and won’t open, they toss it on the floor.) We’ve waged a continuing battle with the kids from Angelitos to use garbage pails, since their inclination is drop garbage anywhere.

The results aren’t pretty. A stretch of green roadside becomes an impromptu dump. The river - especially after a holiday - is littered with styrofoam food containers, bags of garbage and whatever detritus is left from the day’s fun.

Rivers and creeks are generally treated as good places to throw garbage, even whole communities’ garbage. In part, that’s because when the torrential rains come the garbage is swept away.

A Utila beach, and mainland garbage

Not good news for the people downstream, of course. Ultimately, the garbage ends up somewhere, and oceanfront communities complain the big rains bring a flood of garbage into the Caribbean and onto their beaches. We wandered along a dirt road to a deserted cove in Utila, which would have been stunning except for the dune of plastic garbage, likely largely from the mainland.

Even the rains can’t sweep all the garbage away. Tegucigalpa, the capital, was hammered with a two-hour rain during Semana Santa and had massive flooding.

A big part of the problem was garbage. “The floods in the capital were generated by the large amount of garbage dumped in streams, rivers, streets, curbs and gutters,” La Prensa reported. Drains were blocked, creeks and ditches overflowed and streets filled with black, garbage-choked water.

Maybe worrying about garbage comes later, when two-thirds of the population isn’t living in poverty. 

Maybe the lack of easy access to markets for recycled materials, especially outside the cities is an issue. (There are people who scavenge the loads as they come into the Tegucigalpa dump, grabbing cardboard and plastic and metal and selling them to brokers on the fringes. We get garbage pickup three times a week; I assume the guys on the truck grab what can be sold. My partner met a guy who scavenged plastic bottles, crushed them with his truck and took them to the city to sell when he had enough.)

Or maybe getting people to think about garbage - about shared responsibilities and shared losses - would be a step toward a society that thought about tackling some of those harder issues.

The children's education fund: Even really stupid commitments should be honoured

Martyn Brown raises an interesting point about the NDP pledge to kill a really stupid piece of public policy the Campbell government put in place in 2007.

The Children’s Education Fund never made any sense. The Liberals said the government would put $1,000 for every child born in the province into a fund. Beginning in 2025, when the a teen graduated from high school, he or she would get the money, plus interest, for postsecondary training or education. Figure $2,200.

It was a goofy policy, pulled out of thin air when Gordon Campbell needed something to announce at the party’s 2006 convention.

And there have been suggestions for a couple of years - OK, perhaps just by me - to get rid of it.

In 2011, I wrote that the government was committing $47 million to the fund that year, money that was needed for services.

“There’s no logical basis for the government to decide that a tuition subsidy for students starting school in 2025 is a priority today — more important than caring for the disabled, improving health care or offering a tax cut to encourage employment growth," I wrote then.

“In fact, the notion that the government can predict the needs of students two decades in the future is dubious. Imagine the outgoing Socreds trying to come up with a tuition plan that would work for students in 2011.

“The amount, for example, could be a pittance compared to the cost of education more than a decade from now.

“Or alternately, a future government, given the need for skilled British Columbians, could have decided post-secondary education should be free to some qualifying students, or even all students. That’s not an outlandish notion, given the shift to a knowledge-based economy in the province....

“Why not take the $47 million and address today’s needs, through scholarships or education credits or tax breaks, or target First Nations’ high school graduation rates, or address other educational needs?

“It’s also bizarre that the fund makes no distinctions based on the needs of either the province, or the students.

“A multimillionaire’s child will get $2,000; so will a youth coming out of care, living on income assistance and trying to get an education. 

“A smart program would target bright students who couldn’t afford an education, and be based on merit and need. Or it could support education for students entering fields that were critical to the province’s future.”

By 2025, I noted, the government would have stashed more than $1 billion in the fund.

The government changed the plan this year, pledging to give parents a cheque for every child on their sixth birthdays, to put into an RESP.

Brown’s point is that parents who had babies between 2007 and today had a right to count on the money and taking it away violates a “social contract.” (And he acknowledges, implicitly, the irony of the argument, given his role in the Campbell government’s illegal ripping up of contracts with pubic sector unions.)

The programs needs to be axed.

But perhaps there was a commitment here, at least to the parents of children born since in 2007. It might be right to preserve the program in its original form for those families. After all, the money has been set aside.

Even stupid commitments probably should be honoured.

Vote for our musical Cuso volunteer video

This is utterly shameless, I admit.
Cuso International had a contest, inviting volunteers around the world to submit videos about the experience.
We entered, with a song featuring the accordion stylings of Jody Paterson and my guitar fumblings.
I kind of like it.
What I would like you to do is go the Cuso Facebook page and watch the video.
If you think it's kind of OK, you have to like both the Cuso Facebook page and our video to vote for us.

Footnote:
Should you want to sing along, here are the lyrics, to the tune of Leaving on Jet Plane,

All our bags are packed, we're standing here

About to be a volunteer

In a country Peace Corps left just weeks ago

Will we get gunned down? Or take up coke?

Will our workmates think we're quite the joke?

With our high-school Spanish messing up the show?

But we're flexible Cuso stock

We'll survive this culture shock

If capacity needs building, count us in

We're working in a new land

Don't know when we'll be back again

Our world won't be the same

We've met campesinos by the score,

We've learned most folks here are really poor

We know more about la roya than we should

We've been bounced down dirt roads, left to wait

Learned that 6 o'clock is more like 8

And that sunshine in December sure feels good

We're flexible Cuso stock

We'll survive the culture shock

If capacity needs building, we're your team

The power failures don't get us down

We've landed in a real nice town

And the guns aren't aimed at us, just worn with jeans

Are we changing culture? It's hard to tell

Communications is a real tough sell

In a country that has faith and not much more

But they love the photos, think the website's cool

The Facebook friends and the PowerPoints too

But will they keep it up when we walk out the door?

We're flexible Cuso stock

We've survived this culture shock

We're thriving in a most appealing way

Thank you for this chance to shine

In a land that has no sense of time

O Cuso...can we stay?

If a government can't provide licence plates... Part 2

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the Honduran government’s baffling inability to get licence plates into the hands of drivers.

I saw scads of cars and motorcycles without licence plates, and thought at first that people were just ignoring the law. 

But it turned out the government didn’t actually have the plates, and hadn’t for almost a year. That was a major hassle for drivers, who had to keep going back to the licensing office every month to get temporary permits, a process that took hours. 

And in a country with a big crime problem, some 330,000 vehicles and motorcycles without licence plates was unhelpful. 

The news stories were never clear why the government couldn’t get its act together.

A year later, and the story is back in the papers.

There are still about 200,000 vehicles without plates because the government can’t supply them.

The president mused about having prisoners make licence plates, but then learned the government is too broke to buy the needed equipment. 

It can’t afford to order plates, either, even though drivers’ licence fees should cover the costs (less than $20 to make a pair of plates).

This is new to me. In Canada, governments can borrow what they need. Deficits are debated, but, ultimately, if governments need licence plates or money to pay teachers or buy medical supplies, they just borrow a bit more, at pretty good rates.

Not in Honduras. Teachers plan a one-day strike tomorrow because they say they haven’t been paid. Buses weren’t running in the cities today, because owners say the government hasn’t paid promised subsidies. 

Road repairs have been stalled for a months, because the government can’t pay the contractors’ outstanding bills. It offered the companies a combination of cash and government bonds, but they weren’t keen. 

That’s not surprising. Honduras went to the international bond market this month to raise money. The rating agencies put them deep into junk bond territory. The issue raised $500 million, at 7.5-per-cent interest. (B.C. borrows at less than half that rate per cent.)

The president said the government could have sold more bonds, but he was worried the money would just be wasted. And a commission is to be set up to manage the money, to ensure it isn’t squandared. (Commissions are big here. Anytime a public body fails to perform, the response to seems to be to create a new one to oversee it, instead of just fixing the original governance problem.)

Anyway, back to the licence problem. No money. Prisoners can’t make them. 

So the government is looking at a public-private partnership, hoping to find a company that will take over the whole process in return for the chance to make a profit on licensing cars and drivers.

Those 3P agreements are very big in Honduras right now too. The government has signed a contract to hand over management of the country’s main port for 30 years. 

And I suppose model cities are a way of privatizing government itself.

It’s an appealing concept for Honduras, much more than in North America. Private companies can borrow more cheaply than government for infrastructure, a significant saving on large projects. Government is judged corrupt and incompetent. So the idea of handing responsibility to a third party is appealing.

But there’s an obvious problem.

A government that can’t manage the problem or deliver the service - like licence plates - probably can’t negotiate a good private-public partnership deal either.

Do-it-yourself gated communities and police in Honduras

Gated communities are different in Honduras.

New subdivisions in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, the two big cities, tend to be built behind walls and gates. But that happens in North America too.

But people in existing neighbourhoods also throw up their own barricades and gates, blocking city streets into the neighbourhood with concrete blocks or corrugated steel and allowing limited, controlled entrance.

There are no permits, or traffic studies. One day you can drive through, and the next you can’t - at least without showing ID and explaining where you’re going.

La Prensa reported 18 San Pedro Sula neighbourhoods have blocked traffic so far, with more making plans.

The people who live in the barrios say crime has fallen, and they’re happy.  

Urban residents have no confidence in police or the justice system, so they come up with their own solutions.

Of course, the people in other neighbourhoods, who now have travel another 20 blocks to get to work aen’t so keen. Neither are bus and taxi drivers who don’t know from week to week which roads will be closed next.

And of course, the barriers don’t actually reduce the number of criminals or crime. They just shift it from one neighbourhood, where people have enough money or organization to put up barriers, to another where they don’t.

When the justice system doesn’t work, people eventually take measures into their own hands.

By building barricades. Or by paying for their own surrogate police forces.

And Honduras has a ton of them. Last month, a UN Human Rights working group on mercenaries urged the Honduran government to get a grip on the explosion of private security forces.

There are more than 700 registered private security companies, many more unregistered, and some 70,000 armed private guards. That’s five times the number of police officers in the country, and twice the police and military forces combined.

You get used to armed guards outside the banks, or riding shotgun - literally - on the delivery trucks.

But 70,000 is an astonishing number. And the UN group noted they are at risk of becoming “a substitute for competent and accountable police.” It’s deeply flawed, but there is at least theoretical accountability for real police that doesn’t exist for the private police forces.

And, again, private police forces only protect those who can pay. 

Or, the UN group warned, they may go farther. “Human rights violations allegedly committed by private security companies are not investigated, perpetrators remain unprosecuted and victims do not have access to remedies.” 

None of this is easy to sort out. If your store has been robbed a few times and you can afford a guard with a shotgun, then it becomes a wise investment. If people are riding through your neighbourhood and committing robberies, maybe killings, then barricading streets seems a good idea.

Or if you live in a remote community and a couple of guys keep stealing things from the rickety houses of everyone else in the community, it makes sense to deal justice directly.

What all these responses to crime have in common is that they don’t change the reality of life in the country. They create a bit more security for some, and less for others, and increase injustice, rather than restoring it.

Barricades and private security guards are no substitute for a police and legal system that actually works.

It's school deworming time in San Pedro Sula

After more than a year in Honduras, I remain in a state of near-constant amazement.

San Pedro Sula is the country’s largest city, with glitzy malls - way nicer than any in Victoria, our old hometown - and all the North American fast food chains.

Take this, you'll feel better

But El Tiempo reported this week that students at César López Pérez kicked off the first day of deworming, 2013.

Some 700 kids lined up for the chewable tablets, thanks to the municipality’s Healthy Schools Program. By the end of the campaign, 96,000 students in 344 schools will have been dewormed.

It’s the fourth year for the effort, supported by Operation Blessing, a U.S.-based charity/aid organization.

Deworming is likely a good thing. (You can never be sure, I’ve learned. It’s always possible someone’s brother-in-law has the monopoly on Worm-Be-Gone tablets and is making big money.)

And I might not have thought twice if the campaign had been in a rural community, where water and food supplies would likely be suspect.

But the idea of mass deworming campaign for kids in the country’s largest urban centre is a pretty stark reminder of how far Honduras has to go.

Lib MLA: 'Why would you rent from somebody who didn’t support you?'

“If you contact every MLA in this province... find out if they don’t rent from supporters.” 

I’ve been surprised this story and interview with Vernon-Monashee MLA Eric Foster hasn’t attracted more attention.

Especially his claim that MLAs routinely make a point of renting office space - with tax dollars - from people who contribute to their campaign.

Foster has been criticized by the auditor general for having taxpayers pick up the bills for a near-total renovation of the building he chose for his constituency office.

Especially as the building was bought just before the election by a family that contributed to his campaign. One of the co-owners was also hired by Foster as his constituency assistant.

It looks bad, especially as Foster rejected the less costly office occupied by his Liberal predecessor.

Taxpayers cover leasehold improvements for constituency offices - usually things like creating a meeting room or replacing worn-out flooring.

But Foster acknowledges that he chose a building that was bsically a shell. Taxpayers, the auditor general noted, paid for “purchasing and installing a complete forced air heating/cooling system including a four-ton heat pump and 75,000 BTU furnace, replacing the building's wiring system, installing vapour barriers in exterior walls and purchasing and installing a new double paned 18-foot by nine-foot storefront window and new plumbing including gas piping." 

That’s a great deal for the landlords. Their property is worth a lot more thanks to major renovations.

Not so good for taxpayers. 

Foster talked with Marshall Jones of Info-Tel news about the deal. The legislature comptroller approved it, he says.

Asked about the appearance of preferential treatment for a donor to his campaign, Foster was unrepentant.

“Why would you rent from somebody who didn’t support you?” he asked.

“If you contact every MLA in this province and ask them who they rent from, find out if they don’t rent from supporters,” he said.

Any business person is going to buy from someone who supports their business, he added.

Except, of course, the businesspeople are spending their own money.

Update:

Anon makes a good point in the comments.

If you want to spend more than $25,000 on goods or services in government, you are required to go through a competitive bidding process. It’s a away of getting the best deal and avoiding favoritism or corruption.

But MLAs don’t believe the rules that apply to everyone else in government should apply to them.

Which inevitably raises the question - why not?

La Moskitia: The road less travelled for a reason

Part of the regular route to La Moskitia (Jody Paterson)

Tourists don’t much go to La Moskitia.

The vast rainforest in southern Honduras, bordered by the Caribbean and Nicaragua, is an extraordinary natural wonder. It includes the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, jungles, lagoons and miles of untouched beach.  It’s home to Garifuna, Miskito and Pech communities, with distinct cultures. 

But all that empty space also makes it attractive to narcos shipping cocaine from South America to U.S. markets. The risk of running into narcotrafficantes is tiny, but it’s not good for tourism.

And more significantly, it’s really hard to get there, and to get around. 

We finished a meeting in Tela, a great Honduran beach town, and set out for Tocoa, midway to La Moskitia. Seven hours later - the last stretch hair-raising as our driver tried to pass anything that moved in our bus, long retired from some U.S. school district - we arrived.

The next morning we piled into a pickup headed for Batalla. That’s the only public transportation. Trucks run from Tocoa, with passengers and freight. It’s about $20 to sit inside, $15 to ride in the truck bed, crammed in with half-a-dozen people, propane tanks, crates and mysterious bags and boxes. 

That’s a lot of money for people here. Workers in the region’s vast African palm plantations are paid $5 or $6 a day.

Our destination, Palacios, was just across the lagoon from Batalla. (We were bound for La Moskitia because CASM, the organization my partner works with, has projects there.)

The first stretch was a paved highway. Then a ridiculously bad dirt road. Then almost an hour on tracks running ruler- straight through African palm plantations. 

The plantations are eerie. Rows of palm trees, planted in a perfect pattern, with no other plant life. Palm oil is hot right now, for food products and biofuel, and there is a rush to plant more and more trees. That has led to violent land clashes between powerful industrial interests and campesinos who claim the same land. Some 88 people have died in the last two years.

We came to a narrow lagoon crossing. There was no bridge. A small wooden platform, mounted on plastic barrels, nudged the shore. Boys put down two 12-inch planks and, after picking up four more passengers, we bumped onto the boat. A rope was tied to trees on each bank. The boys clambered on the ferry and hauled us across.

And then the road got strange. We were beside the Caribbean. A trail through the sand dunes led to the beach. The truck bounced through the dunes, across the beach, struggling and pitching through the sand, veering out into the waves to cross streams flowing into the ocean.

And at the end of the road, all the travel is by boat.

All part of the adventure for us. 

But a major barrier to any efforts to any economic development in the region.

We visited Plaplaya, a Garifuna community of about 800 people on a strip of land between the lagoon and miles of deserted Caribbean beaches. (The Garifuna are a culture made up of South American Indians and African slaves who blended on St. Vincent and were exiled to Roatan by the British in 1797, eventually settling along the coast. They’ve maintained their own language and culture.)

Planning the wine business

Plaplaya has a school, and the men catch fish and the women garden, especially yucca, a staple food, but there is little non-subsistence economic activity. 

CASM is working with a group of about 15 women on a microbusiness project. They each contribute $5 a month to create capital, attend workshops on rights and leadership and business. Their plan is to start making wine from the sea grapes that grow wild along the beach.

It’s a good idea. But getting the wine to an outside market will take a 45-minute boat ride and a four-hour truck ride. 

Making a sales trip to Trujillo, where there are tourists who might buy the wine, will require the same trip, plus another hour on a bus. And the roundtrip will cost more than $50 and require an overnight stay - a pretty big hit for a co-op that is raising $75 each month in working capital.

The isolation isn’t all bad, of course. Other Garifuna communities in Honduras are facing battles for their land as developers and agricultural companies covet the beachfront communities and land. 

But Plaplaya and other communities in the region - and the 80,000 residents - pay a significant price for their isolation.

The main street in Plaplaya (Yet there is one new SUV, despite no road access)

Footnote: Transportation is always a problem for remote communities. But it’s a much broader issue in Honduras. The construction sector claims 70 per cent of the road system is in disrepair, and it certainly seems that way. Maintenance barely exists - unless you count the people on the highway shovelling dirt into a pothole and holding out a bucket for drivers’ contributions. And most work has been stalled because the government hasn’t paid contractors. (Partly because of disagreements over the work, partly because there is no money.)

Liberal MLAs should be ashamed of role in scandal

The sordid, bumbling ethnic outreach scandal has sealed the Liberals' fate in the coming election.

It has also finished Christy Clark’s leadership. She is responsible for the actions of the government, for choosing the senior managers, for not demanding to be kept informed, for remaining willfully blind. 

She failed as a leader. She failed the citizens, and the people who put their trust in the Liberal party.

But what about the Liberal MLAs? This is supposed to be a system in which citizens elect representatives who speak for them and share in responsibility for governing. MLAs are responsible for the conduct of government, or the opposition.

Liberal MLAs also failed. They abandoned their responsibilities and let the premier’s office and political staffers run amok. They didn’t ask questions about who was hired or what they were doing, or set standards. 

These are $100,000 a year jobs, representing voters who have placed considerable trust in the men and women they send to Victoria.

Instead, MLAs vote the party line. They defend the indefensible. They inexplicably give up their right and responsibility to represent their constituents, and cede all power to the premier’s office and political operatives. 

Which is not why most chose to run.

All the candidates in the coming election should think about this scandal, the failure of Liberal MLAs to exercise their responsibilities and the dire consequences - not just for the party, but for democracy.

Racing through jungle rivers in the night

Sweeping through a narrow jungle river at high speed, in a long, narrow crowded boat, as a searchlight picks out trees crowding the banks in the darkness - business travel didn’t used to be like this.

We’ve gone to where the road ends and far, far beyond.

Travel in Honduras is often an adventure, but last week took it to a new, Indiana Jones level.

The boat journey, about four hours, was the highlight. We left Batalla at dusk. The collectivos - shared boats to the heart of La Moskitia - don’t leave until the last truck has arrived at the end of the road in the Garifuna village, delivering passengers and goods for roadless communities down the line.

The boat is a pipante. The traditional versions - still much in use - are hollowed out of a log, long, narrow and barely above the water. Men fish and paddle the lagoons to forage in the jungle, families travel, hand-carved paddles moving the log boats through the water.

The collectivos follow the same design, though larger. Some 40-feet long, less than six feet wide, flat-bottomed and with about 18 inches of freeboard.

We cruised down the first lagoon, then through a canal so shallow the boy had had to jump out and pull us to deeper water. Then down a river, with scores of egrets settling in trees for the night.

Past Garifuna villages and isolated settlements and suspiciously large new houses with open launches in front powered by twin 200-hp outboards. (Some questions are best not asked in the region, a centre for drug transport to northern markets.)

By the time we entered the next large lagoon, it was fully dark. We passed another pipante full of travellers, and I realized none of the boats had running lights.

The waves picked up a bit. The freight - including our packs - was in the front, covered with a tarp. There were six rows of benches, with three passengers in each. Passengers shared green sheets of plastic to pull up over our heads when the spray splashed over us.

At the end of the lagoon, we slowed and picked our way along the shore as the driver played a searchlight along the dense forest until he found an improbably small river entrance - perhaps 10 yards wide.

Then he opened the outboard up, and we swooped and swerved through the channel. Our bow wave swept through mangroves and water hyacinth and floating grasses rose and fell. In the dark. Openings appeared magically just when it appeared we would run aground.

The shore, glimpsed in the starlight, changed constantly - grasses, trees, a long stretch of six-foot tall fan palms that looked like waving creatures in the star light. Triffids maybe.

Then a light flickered from shore, and we pulled into a makeshift log dock, where a cluster of people waited. We unloaded a few passengers and lot of goods, took on some more passengers with their belongings and set out again. A cluster of boys struck a gangster pose for a photo.

The jungle closed in, the channel became even narrower and the boat still moved impossibly quickly, skidding through turns, brushing past thick trees growing from the water, the spotlight playing over the trees and vines, bats darting through the bright tunnel. When we had to slow, the night came alive with sounds of the jungle.

Stars, jungle, an outboard motor, river banks pressing in - part Heart of Darkness, part the grandest Disneyland ride ever.

We slowed suddenly in the dark, because two other boats were in the channel, a smaller one unloading melons into another pipante.

We were stranded in shallows again, this time both the boat chica and the driver, stepping into to the muck to push os free.

Then out into Laguna Brus, a giant body of water separated from the Caribbean by a sandbar. 

We picked up speed for the run to the town of Brus, our destination. There were more stars than I have ever seen in Canada, and under the light the water turned to a light grey, so it seemed we were racing through clouds. Burst of phospherence flashed by in the wake.

It was a painfully long trip by the time we pulled up to the dock in Brus, a town of about 8,000 that can’t be reached by road. 

It would have been spectacular in the day time. But it was unforgettable at night.

Footnote: The boats leave Batalla in the late afternoon when the trucks arrive. The truck drivers and helpers sleep there, then head back to Tocoa in the morning, leaving early enough to allow a return trip. Which meant we had to catch a return boat at 4 a.m. in Brus to get back in time to pile into a waiting truck. A good chance to see dawn over the lagoons.