Murder in the city, daily life and tourism

Honduras took another hit this week when a British tourist was shot and killed in San Pedro Sula, the biggest city. 

The headlines in the British media, naturally, weren’t good. Most stories noted Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, which seems to be the main thing people know about the country.

Honduras, for tourists, isn’t dangerous. My partner’s son and his family - including boys 11 and 13 - just spent six weeks here, feeling secure and welcome everywhere they went.

But Kaya Omer, the 33-year-old British tourist, had a different, tragic experience. 

It’s hard to tell tourists there are two Honduras. Copan Ruinas, Tela, Santa Rosa de Copan, most smaller communities are completely safe for travellers. The big cities are dangerous. 

The risk is that people will either be scared from the whole country, or not scared enough where they should be.

Omer was walking and shooting video in a nice San Pedro Sula neighbourhood around 11 a.m. Accounts vary, but it seems two young men and a woman tried to steal the camera, and his backpack, which contained two more cameras, an iPad and money. He resisted, they shot him.

You can’t blame the victim. But when we go to Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula, we carry nothing when we walk. Certainy not a backpack of valuables; if you travel with possessions in the city, you take a cab, with a driver you know. (Most Hondurans do the same if they can.)

During our in-country Cuso orientation, we learned to be ready to avoid eye contact and hand whatever we had over to a robber if it came to that. (And to carry at least a reasonable amount of money so the bad guys wouldn’t get mad at a mingy payday.)

But how do you give tourists that kind of advice and still expect them to visit? We found the orientation, with its bleak scenarios, alarming, and we were committed.

The real solution, of course, is to reduce the crime and violence. Tourists almost never experience crime, but urban Hondurans - especially those without the money to insulate themselves - live with the risk every day. Small businesses, taxi drivers, vendors in the city pay weekly extortion to stay safe.

Two days after Omer was killed, President Porifirio Lobo said security has improved this year. “Everyone feels that has gotten better,” he said.

But it’s hard to find anyone who actually say that. Some groups are predicting the murder rate will be higher again for 2012. There might have been a few tiny steps on police corruption. Drug seizures are up. (But Canadians have learned giant seizures don’t make a bit of difference to the trade, supply or crime.) But life hasn’t changed, or security improved, for Hondurans.

The Observatorio de la Violencia just reported on 2012 massacres, events in which three or more people were killed in the same attack. There were 115, killing 432 people. Half were gang executions, and another eight per cent involved fights between gangs. Imagine a mass murder in B.C. every week, based on the relative populations.

There are no easy solutions. The enforcement and justice systems don’t work - more 90 per cent of murders go unsolved. “Impunity” is a big public complaint. Some people are just above the law.

Still, efforts could be made. El Salvador reported a 41 per cent drop in murders in 2012 as a result of a truce between the two major gangs. That took the rate to 38 murders per hundred thousand people, from 65 in 2011. The Honduran rate in 2011 was 87; Canada’s was 1.7. (The deal was facilitiated by Adam Blackwell, a Canadian diplomat now on the Honduran Public Security Reform Commission. He has raised the idea of a similar truce in Honduras.)

It’s far from a cure-all. But two or three fewer murders a day would free up a lot of police time.

The frustrating thing, again, is that Honduras is safe for tourists, or as safe as their home countries. You can walk the streets of Copan Ruinas late at night without fear, people are welcoming and they are eager for you to like their country. 

But it’s asking a lot to expect people to ignore the headlines.

Liberals suffer big self-inflicted damage in three ridings: What's gone wrong?

The Liberals’ fumbling in three potential swing ridings is baffling. They’re spending big money on political advisors and campaign staff (some from party funds, some from taxpayers).

But the Liberals have suffered self-inflicted wounds in three ridings - Vernon-Monashee, Boundary-Similkameen and Abbotsford-South. 

Polls point to an easy New Democrat victory. If the Liberals hope for a surprise win, they’ll need those seats.

Instead, they’re giving the advantage to rivals.

In Boundary-Similkameen, the Liberals have bounced sitting MLA John Slater. Publicly, they say he has “personal issues that, in our view, impact his ability to represent the party.” Privately, Liberal operatives have whispered he has a drinking problem.

Slater says no. He’s naturally outspoken, he says, and that’s uncommon in caucus. He concedes the interaction of prescription drugs and antihistamines and “a glass of wine” might have affected him on a few occasions, including in a caucus meeting after he had a glass of wine at lunch.

That’s not a great explanation. Many people have decided a glass of wine at lunch isn’t a great idea; certainly after one bad episode that would seem prudent.

But the party people could have convinced Slater to step aside. An delegation of MLAs could have talked to him. Or the party could have backed another candidate in a nomination contest and let party members in the riding decide.

Instead, Slater says, they came to him in December, claimed polls showed he couldn’t win and pressured to go quietly or else. He thinks the polls were fake. The riding association president quit in protest.  An Osoyoos Times editorial described the party’s treatment of Slater as “abhorrent, disgusting, amateurish, disrespectful and childish.” 

And now that he’s been turfed as a Liberal, Slater is running as an independent.

Which is bad news for the likely Liberal candidate, Oliver Mayor Linda Larson, who had been lined up in advance by the big guys. (Real nomination meetings have certainly become rare in some parties.)

Slater won the 2009 election with 38 per cent of the vote. The NDP candidate came second with 33 per cent, the Conservatives third with 20.

So if Slater takes 10 per cent of the vote and some Liberal supporters stay home because they don’t like the way their MLA was treated, the NDP wins easily.

These kinds of situations are difficult. There was likely no tidy outcome. But this seems a  good example of how not to do it.

The situation in Abbotsford-South is similar. Abbotsford Coun. Moe Gill was encouraged to run for the Liberal nomination. He signed up 1,500 members and had a lock on an open contest.

But then Rich Coleman and party brass told him they had decided Daryl Plecas, a Fraser Valley University crime prof, should be the candidate and there would be no real nomination contest.

Gill initially bowed to the pressure, changed his mind, and is now running as a motivated and angry independent.

Again, bad news for the Liberals. Plecas will compete with Gill, incumbent John van Dongen and a Conservative for the traditional Liberal vote.

In the last election, van Dongen won with 59 per cent of the vote, with the NDP candidate at 26 per cent. This time, the NDP actually has a chance, although van Dongen remains the favorite.

And then there is Okanagan North. 

Liberal MLA Eric Foster, chair of the legislative committee responsible for appointing an auditor general, has been under fire for his role in the decision not to re-appoint John Doyle. 

In part, because Foster remained chair even though he was singled out for criticism in an auditor general’s report last year.

The auditor general’s office raised concern about a potential conflict of interest, as Foster spent $67,000 on renovations for a new constituency office in a building owned by the family of his assistant. Foster referred that issue to the conflict commissioner, who found no wrongdoing.

The auditor general also raised concerns that Foster requested $78,000 in reimbursements for the landlord without any supporting documents - receipts, quotes, evidence of value for money. About $67,000 was eventually paid. (Foster says no one told him of the report.)

Foster refuses to provide the documents. And Conservative candidate Scott Anderson has questioned the spending, alleging the family of the constituency assistant bought the building a week before the election, and the downtown office used by Tom Christensen, Foster’s predecessor, cost taxpayers about 40 per cent less a year.

Not the Liberal party’s fault. But the leadership’s inaction - the bad decision on Doyle, the failure to make Foster produce the documents, the long delay in facing the problem - let the questions build. (Christy Clark finally tried to address the Doyle issue this week.)

In 2009, the Liberals won in Vernon-Monashee with 37 per cent of the vote. The NDP candidate came second with 32 per cent, Greens third with 17 per cent and Conservatives fourth with eight. 

Conservative candidate Scott Anderson has received good local media coverage on the constituency office issue. Even a small Conservative gain would mean a Liberal loss.

One blunder, you could chalk up to the nature of politics. Not everything goes right. 

Three strikes should worry Liberal supporters. 

Footnote: The other questions are how these missteps affect donors and volunteers. Top-down campaigns, where candidates are picked by a handful of party strategists, risk alienating the local troops. And no one wants to give money to a losing cause, or if there are doubts it will be spent competently.

Another bizarre and alarming twist in the auditor general scandal

The Times Colonist has a damaging story and column on the decision not to reappoint John Doyle as auditor general.

Rob Shaw and Les Leyne reveal that Liberal MLA Eric Foster, the chairman of the committee that turfed Doyle, was cited for spending and conflict concerns in an auditor general’s report in October - “the only MLA singled out.”

The devastating audit identified widespread sloppy management practices of MLA expenses and $63 million in legislature spending.

And it cited the case of $78,000 paid to the landlord for renovations at Foster’s constituency office in 2009.

Doyle raised several issues. First, there was a possible conflict of interest, he found. The rented office was in a building owned by the family of Foster’s constituency assistant. The renovations benefited the family.

Foster took that concern to conflict commissioner Paul Fraser, who cleared him.

The October audit also found the bill for renovations was “"paid without an appropriate level of review for reasonableness and without adequate supporting documentation." 

Foster's staff provided only a spreadsheet showing $67,000 in work, without invoices, details or evidence quotes were obtained for the work to get the best price.

The payment also violated policy on renovations in rented offices, which are to be covered only if specified in the lease. The auditor was told Speaker Bill Barisoff ordered the payment to be made.

It seems clear Foster should have quit the committee, given the possible perception that he had an axe to grind with Doyle. 

This is where things get bizarre. Foster says he never knew the spending was questioned in the audit. So serious concerns are raised, and no one in government or legislature even bothered to ask him about them. He didn't think the auditor's concern about conflict was significant enough to justify stepping aside

A remarkably sloppy way to treat the public’s money, and handle an important appointment.

The land where fireworks are king

I’ve lived in places where they set off fireworks to celebrate different cultural events, but Hondurans are the most enthusiastic.

Fireworks here feature in the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. They start early. We were listening to the whistles and bangs - some quite resounding - by mid-December. The really big explosions are at Christmas and New Year’s. 

I grew up in Ontario, and fireworks were pretty much a one-night thing, on Victoria Day. In Quebec, fireworks were a St. Jean Baptiste Day tradition, although more subdued. (Or maybe just more subdued for anglophones.)

When we moved to Victoria, things got stranger. Fireworks were part of Halloween. Times Colonist columnist Jack Knox suggested that since British Columbians already had excited children in masks running around dark streets, and fireworks, they might as well legalize drunk driving for the night and go for the danger trifecta. 

The late Jack (the Wonder Dog, not the columnist) hated Halloween firecrackers, hiding as best he could. But it was usually brief - one night, with occasional bursts before or after.

In Honduras, fireworks are a year-round affair. There is a birthday tradition of blasting the lucky celebrant awake at 5 a.m. with fireworks and music. The road between La Entrada and Santa Rosa de Copan has a collection of firework stands, all identical, selling products made in small factories in nearby towns. (Though the stands increase in the run up to Christmas. I counted 28 on one side of the highway.)

There is a certain danger in all this. In October, a fireworks factory blew up killing the owner, injuring five workers and damaging nearby houses. Tegucigalpa, the capital, has tried to ban fireworks because of the number of kids showing up in emergency wards with burns and missing fingers.

In a country with an average 21 murders a day, firework enforcement might seem less urgent. But policing priorities are always hard to understand. In December, La Prensa reported police had swept in on eight stores selling knock-off Pepe jeans and seized their stock. Protecting the value of a global billion-dollar brand took priority, apparently, over protecting people riding the buses.

Of course we bought fireworks, from the back of a truck parked outside Bodega Gloria and from a neighbour who had set up a table in front of his house. We’ve had youngsters - grandboys,with family - visiting from Canada for a while, and cheap, potentially dangerous firecrackers, Roman candles and mariposas and little balls you throw down to the ground to produce a satisfying bang all seemed attractive.

We set a few off in Copan Ruinas to celebrate surviving the end of the world. 

Though, actually, we had a great end of the world. The ruins were open for the night, with a couple of spotlights and rows of Tiki torches. There were few people, and it was magical to wander among 1,600-year-old stone structures and sculptures under the stars, as glow bugs flashed in the grass. We climbed the stones on the side of the ball court, and went into a small room with an arched roof, and with a tiny light saw dozens of bats roosting in the stepped ceiling. We sat on the pyramids and watched the sky, and walked home very happy.

We set off a couple of fireworks on Utila for New Year’s Eve, blasting Roman Candles into the palms.

And a few more for Zachary’s 13th birthday on the beach in Tela, although the fireworks were a little battered by then, having travelled by bus and ferry in a crowded backpack. The Roman candle fizzled. But the mariposas - butterflies - were impressive. It’s a small firecracker, with little wings, and instead of going bang it takes off like a rocket, if you’re lucky. It dives into the ground if you aren’t.

We’re back in Copan now. Happy New Year. I hope you had fireworks.

Honduran economy depends on migrants' transfers to families

A couple of stories in the newspapers this week suggest the best way North Americans could help Honduras is to let a few more people head north to find jobs.

La Prensa reported remittances - the money sent back by Hondurans working in the U.S. - will be up 12 per cent this year.

That would bring the money sent home to about $3.2 billion, or about 18 per cent of the country’s GDP. Put another way, without remittances the GDP per capita would drop from about $4,400 to $3,600. (In Canada, the comparable figure is about $40,000.)

Just about everyone you talk to seems to have friends or relatives working in the U.S., generally without going through the immigration process. They send money home to support the family and cover the costs of getting ahead - a house, or a business. Many come home after a few years of working and saving have given them a chance at a better life here. (The issues are more complex than that summary suggests - some don’t come home, some forget their families and start a new life in the U.S., the money can create jealousies in communities.) 

La Prensa also reported that, with two weeks left in the year, 31,270 Hondurans had been deported from the U.S. by air. Every few days, a jet full of deportees lands in Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula. (The new call centre industry has started recruiting among the returning deportees, looking for those who speak English.)

Thousands more are turned back at the border or robbed, killed or thwarted on the long and dangerous trip from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S.

There are about a million Hondurans in the U.S., about 60 per cent of them “undocumented,” the current term for illegal. Letting a few more in - or cutting the deportations - would mean more remittances and more investment.

Canada, of course, could offer the same opportunities. A small number of Hondurans have been allowed in under temporary worker programs. Opening the door a little wider - and not just for the jobs employers are looking to fill cheaply - could do as much for Honduras as many aid programs.

A country where kids can't do math has a grim future

Honduras is in a constitutional crisis this week, as politicians take on the Supreme Court. Important issues, to be sure.

But there’s another crisis. A major international report on math and science knowledge gave horrible grades to the Honduran educational system.

The Human Sciences Research Council tested math and science knowledge of students in 45 countries. Honduran students ranked at the bottom, with South Africa and Botswana.

Children here aren’t stupid. They start school with potential. But they don’t learn.

The tests were administered to Grade 8 students in most countries, Grade 9 in Honduras, and assessed basic skills and knowledge.

And they showed the school system is failing Honduran kids. Badly.

Take one measure, performance at an international math benchmark. In the U.S., 68 per cent of Grade 8 students reached at least the intermediate level. In Chile, 23 per cent met the standard. In Botswana, 15 per cent.

And at the very bottom, Honduras, at four per cent. Only one in 25 Grade 9 students performed the intermediate level or better in math skills. 

Canada doesn’t participate as a country. But in Ontario, 35 per cent of students met advanced or high benchmark standards.

In Honduras, one per cent achieved the same levels.

Math skills are fundamental. If you’re going to run a business or farm, manage a family budget, plan for your future, you need to be able to deal with numbers confortably.

And the international tests show the Honduran school system is failing to provide students with basic numeracy.

No country - let alone a poor country - can afford to deprive 96 per cent of the population of the basic skills they need to make the most of their potential. The next Bill Gates might be growing up in Honduras, but without a basic education, he or she won’t likely succeed.

There are no easy answers. Schools are closed far too often due to labour disputes, but the government is also incapable of paying teachers on time consistently. Class sizes - perhaps 50 students in five grades - are ridiculous. Teaching methods are antiquated. 

But if things are going to change for Honduras, a better school system is critical.

The politicians can wage their constitutional battles. Unless students are getting a quality education, little will change in Honduras.

Great news - 4,500 people are going to lose their jobs

My grandfather - my mother's dad - was proud of his 40-year pin from General Electric.

There were a few years when he didn’t work, during the Depression. My grandmother served up food to the desperate men who showed up at the door, despite her family’s own hard times. 

But mostly, over more than four decades, Arthur Jones walked a long block down Lansdowne to the Davenport Works each day, came home for lunch, and went back in the afternoon.

There was an implicit deal - do the job well, and GE’s managers would do their job well so you would continue to be employed.

I thought about my grandfather this week, when a National Post headline sounded a familiar theme. “CP Rail shares climb on CEO's plan to cut 23 per cent of workforce,” it said. 

I like the psuedo precision, and neutrality, of phrases like “23 per cent of workforce.”

While shareholders were bidding up CP Rail stock, about 4,500 families - that’s the number of jobs to be cut - were coping with very bad news. People learned they would be unemployed, losing a good job a time when finding any work can be challenging.

I know CP Rail isn’t in business to provide jobs. That if managers didn’t cut these positions, then customers might go to a more efficient railway, and more jobs might be lost. And that shareholders deserve to have managers who run the business effectively and prudently on their behalf.

And I know that no one is being malevolent. CP Rail CEO Hunter Harrison and the management group are charged with - and rewarded for - increasing shareholder value. If they can run the railway with a fewer people, they have an obligation to do so. I’ve been a manager, and made those decisions.

But it’s troubling that we don’t see, or talk about, those 4,500 people and what’s ahead for them, as we talk about the share price. Can government help them, or should there be policies that protect the jobs, or support retraining?

I saw a lot of newspaper stories about Harrison’s plan to cut costs and jobs. But I didn’t read any stories about the family dead terrified by the prospect of unemployment, wondering how they would tell their kids that they had to move because they couldn’t make the mortgage. 

Who does speak for those people?

And how did the social contract between good employers and good employees change so dramatically, without a public discussion?

My grandfather’s tenure with GE came at the end of an era. Celebrity CEO Jack Welch won great praise for chopping more than 100,000 jobs at the company in five years in the early 1980s. 

It’s quite a contrast. My grandfather built giant transformers, as a worker and a foreman. When he was getting older, the company moved him into the guardhouse at the entry to the works, instead of eliminating his job. (He died too young, of lung cancer. You might wonder about the PCBs in those transformers. Or the roll-your-own cigarettes he smoked for 50 years.)

GE wasn’t an anomaly. Employers considered it correct to look after the people who did the work.

That’s changed. Global competition, reduced unionization, tremendous pressure on managers to produce better results every quarter - the social contract has been rewritten.

What’s troubling is that we haven’t talked about the change. We haven’t tallied the cost, or considered policy options, or discussed mitigation strategies. We’ve just adopted policies that resulted in millions of lost jobs. And millions of damaged families.

I doubt the CP Rail jobs could be saved.

But attention must be paid. (Yes, it’s a quote.) People’s lives should not be so casually altered for the worse.

And our public policy debate should be based on more than share prices.

Details of MacIntyre firing shows premier's office plays rough

They play rough in the premier’s office. At least that’s the way it looks from a series of emails following Sara MacIntyre’s firing as communications director in October.

Vaughn Palmer wrote about the emails this week.

MacIntyre seemed “blindsided and bereft” at her firing after eight months in the job, Palmer notes. She had apparently given up a pretty good gig as press secretary to Stephen Harper to join Christy Clark’s team.

The hiring might not have worked out. Certainly MacIntyre messed up in one notable exchange with the media - the video is here - that came to define her in a negative way.

But the firing, based on the email exchange, was brutal and unprofessional.

MacIntyre was called in for a morning meeting with Dan Doyle, Clark’s new chief of staff and told she was out of the job and would be dispatched to a undefined role in the government communications and public engagement office. (The PR shop.)

Later that day. MacIntyre tried to find out what the new job would be, what she would be paid and what her options were. That’s reasonable. That kind of downward move is a firing. The person involved - MacIntyre - has to consider whether to opt for severance rather than the new, lesser job.

So she emailed Lynda Tarras, head of HR for the government. 

“I would like to request some sort of written job description with duties and obligations, reporting structure and terms of employment as well,” wrote MacIntyre.

Tarras said pay and benefits would be unchanged and MacIntyre woud find out what her duties were when she reported to work for her new boss the next morning. No job description was provided.

As a former corporate guy, I have some experience in pushing people from jobs. 

And MacIntyre’s shift was not good HR practice. She should have been given information about the new role, a couple of days to consider her options - and see a lawyer - and respect as an employee.

It’s particularly brutal from the office of a premier who professes to be interested in a different way of doing things. (Though perhaps explained by a desperate desire to avoid paying still more severance to political appointments shown the door.)

I dealt with MacIntyre in her Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation days and found her professional, good at communications and always helpful.

Which doesn’t mean she was the right person for the communications’ director job, of course. And at that level of political job - it paid something like $125,000 - the risk of dismissal is always present.

But the emails suggest a basic disrespect and lack of professionalism.

Palmer notes another interesting aspect to this. The NDP used an FOI request to get the emails, which show HR head Tarras was communicating with MacIntyre in writing. But in ousting Clark's chief of staff Ken Boessenkool a month later after an incident in a Victoria bar with a female staffer, Tarras committed not one single word to paper about her investigation or the departure.

That too shows either poor HR practice, or a desire to avoid FOI accountability.

Clark's new staff, and the hiring freeze that wasn't

When Finance Minister Mike de Jong announced a hiring freeze in September, because the government's budget projections were faulty and the deficit was rising, most people thought he meant, well, a hiring freeze.

Certainly in my past life as a corporate guy, a hiring freeze meant you couldn’t hire people. (Not always a smart policy.)

But according to an unnamed spokesperson for Premier Christy Clark, what de Jong really meant was that no new positions would be created.

So when Clark added three new people to the premier's office Monday - taking her staff from 31 to 34 - that was consistent with a hiring freeze, in her mind, because she had 34 people working for her at some point in the past.

The public wasn't alone in being confused.

The government's HR arm outlined a "NEW" Hiring Approval Process after de Jong’s announced “freeze.”

"There is currently a hiring freeze on all non-critical positions across the BC Public Service. All internal and external hiring requests - including regular, temporary and auxiliary appointments, renewals and extensions - require approval from your deputy minister and the Deputy Minister to the Premier. Hiring will only be approved for areas of critical service or to meet an urgent government priority.

“Consideration must first be given to internal candidates. Requests for external hires will only be approved for critical roles -- corrections and social workers, for example -- and must demonstrate why an internal candidate could not be identified.”

The website could have been a little more accurate. Critical roles include “corrections and social workers” and staffers in the premier’s office.

Clark added her fifth key communications staffer in 21 months, former TV reporter and Ontario Liberal staffer Ben Chin.

Which brings to mind a joke I used in reference to Gordon Campbell’s fretting about communications problems.

A man goes to see the marriage counsellor who has been working with the couple, and says, “The problem is my wife doesn’t understand me.”

“Sure she does,” the counsellor says. “She just thinks you’re a jerk.”

After hiring and whacking three communications directors in a short period, it’s time to consider that the problem might not be communications strategy. It might that people get what you’re saying, and just don’t like it.

Heading to the hills and a model finca

Margarita and family drying coffee in the new secadora

We headed up into the hills this week, to beautiful, rainy forests and a family farm doing everything right. OCDIH, the organization I’m helping with communications, wanted a case study to present to funders.

So we went to meet Rosa Margarita Escalón España. (We, because I recruited Jody, knowing my Spanish would not allow a good interview.)

Which meant 90 minutes on a bus. Then 45 minutes in a truck with Alex and Alexis, the OCDIH ag tech guys who guiding us. After a stop for breakfast in a woman’s tidy kitchen, we pushed up muddy, slippery hills as far as we could and started walking through slippery, sucking mud. (Telephone Spanish is especially challenging; I had apparently missed Alex’s request that we bring boots. They scrounged some up.)

Papayas, with dark green coffee plants behind

Margarita’s place was on the side of a mountain about 45 minutes walk from the road. She had coffee plants, and sugar cane, and of course corn and beans. But she also had papayas and carrots and onions and was trying to grow a few apple trees ordered from the U.S. It’s an integrated ‘finca,’ a farm that combines coffee and a bunch of other crops in a small space.

The family had a sugar cane grinder, run by a horse hooked up to a long arm who walked around and around, grinding the tough cane. The boiled the juice down for sugar, and made caramelos to sell.

The first thing we saw when we arrived was a new secadora - a long structure with a clear plastic roof stretched over arched white PCV tubes. OCDIH promotes the project. Margarita’s family was just finishing the wooden drying tables, with screens across the bottom. The first plastic tub of coffee beans was dumped in the screen while we were there. (Coffee berries are red, like small cherries. You have to pick them, and strip the beans out. They’re kind of slimy, and need to be dried. Typically, they’re dumped on a concrete pad and turned with shovels. The secadora means faster, better drying and fewer broken and damaged beans.)

The house was totally basic - lean against the wall and you would be white with the lime used to paint the adobe bricks. But there was a solar panel, and lights in each room, and a Claro satellite dish.

Margarita and her family are a success story. Standing on the edge of a section of two-year-old coffee plants, with papayas ripening, onions and carrots sprouting and chickens running around the yard, I thought this family had it going on. The soil is good, and enriched with compost. The farm is organic. Margarita is a leader in almost a dozen community groups and women's networks, mostly promoted by OCDIH.

But it’s still a life far removed from what I think of as the modern world.

Jody and friend, in the door of Margarita's tidy kitchen

After we did the interviews and took a bunch of pictures, it was time to go. Two horses were saddled for us. Or one was saddled, for Jody. Mine had a rig made of four branches and a towel, with no stirrups. 

Everyone else walked - Margarita and two of her sons, including the youngest, a nine-year-old. I felt a bit odd, but it was another 45-minute walk, all uphill.

After about 35 minutes, we stopped to admire the Escuela de la Republica de Canada, a development project. It is a heck of walk to that school, but all Margarita’s kids have attended (or still are attending).

But the school goes to Grade 6, and that’s as far as any of the six kids are going to pursue their education. It’s a four-hour walk to the nearest colegio, or high school - less time if you can catch a ride in the back of a passing truck. That’s just too far. The nearest clinic is the same distance. (Though Margarita, as part of the income-producing activities promoted by OCDIH, has attended workshops on traditional medicines and grows plants to use and sell.) Getting products to market means a long slog with a couple of horses.

And I haven’t figured out how the six kids - without their own land - will make their way in the community.

No easy answers - but a heck of a finca.

The life and times of a reluctant volunteer, by the numbers

A day in the fast-paced life of an international development quasi-volunteer, by the numbers.

6:30 - The time in the morning I boarded the bus.

6:45 - The number of hours I spent travelling from Copan Ruinas to Santa Rosa de Copan and back for a two-hour meeting.

146 - The actual road distance travelled, in kilometres. (Which, yes, means an average speed of 22 km/h.) 

2: The number of dead cows I saw by the side of the road. One, coming home, was quite deflated. The morning dead cow was fresher - a dog was tugging at its stomach, and about 15 black vultures were waiting their turns.

30: The number of Powerpoint slides on writing effective case studies I used to compensate for my poor Spanish. (Sorry, Steve Jobs.)

9: The inches between rows of seats in the Cassasolo Express bus, and the exact size of the tiny stools they had crafted for people to sit in the aisle - a very nice touch.

1: The number of monkeys I saw tethered to a tree outside a house on the bus ride home.

35: The people squeezed into a bus with seats for 24.

11: The buses that can back into spaces at the Santa Rosa de Copan bus terminal, a dusty parking lot with the highway in front and market stalls behind. It’s a part of Honduras that feels truly Third World. Touts lie blatantly about travel options - that bus doesn’t run any more - and wrestle people toward buses. Vendors sell everything from food to medicines. If you go with it, there is a charming energy.

28: The number of fireworks stands, on one side of the road, on the way into La Entrada, the reputedly druggy town between Copan Ruinas and the rest of the country. The stands all look exactly the same. Only one actually had a name; the rest were generic. And the fireworks are made in households in the nearby villages, a fact that should raise alarms on so many levels.

1: The man heading into a car repair place to beg in La Entrada with two metal protheses for hands and forearms, slings to hold them in place and two feet that pointed directly toward each other. It is hard to see how an accident could have produced such a bad outcome.

3: The number of roadside stands selling tortoise eggs. Is that legal, I asked on an earlier trip? No, but they're very tasty, I was told.

31: The number of vendors, from 7 to 60, who descended on the bus in La Entrada, selling everything imaginable. Off-brand soda pop, belts, toothpaste, watches, krazy glue, mangoes, chips, potato and plaintain, anti-fungal medicines, a piece of chicken, tortillas and cabbage in plastic wrap, lychees, gum, popcorn balls, cucumber chunks. Tough to say no to the kids, or the wizened.

8: The number of 50-pound bags of coffee beans hoisted on to the roof of the bus in La Entrada. How the two guys would get them anywhere in Copan Ruinas is a mystery.

3: One seat in front of me on the bus ride back, there was a young, skinny guy with a white straw cowboy hat, a jean jacket with some fancy beading and a sketchy moustache. The young woman - girl - with him seemed fragile, a scarf with kid-like images over her hair, kind of hunched and clutching herself. When we stopped in the middle of nowhere and they got up to leave, I realized he was carrying their brand new baby, all swaddled in a hat and blankets and scarves. She was maybe out of hospital little too soon. But hey, a new life was starting.

 I remember that. It's different here, but some things - maybe the most important things - are the same.

Cornhusk dolls and flawed development plans

Children of the cornhusk dolls on the march (Jody Paterson photo)

The cornhusk doll kids of La Pintada are part of life in Copan Ruinas.

La Pintada is about five kilometres away - an hour’s walk, one more poor village among many. A few years ago, a development project introduced a couple of microenterprises, women’s co-ops to produce “artesania” for the tourist market.

One group of women make cornhusk dolls. They’re cute, brightly coloured and obviously take some skill, but are a little boring.

And the marketing plan is deeply flawed. The children of La Pintada walk into town, with grubby plastic bags full of the dolls, and brandish them at gringos. They ask $1 for a doll. A few kids have laminated sheets, in English, that describe the co-op. They’re pretty persistent in thrusting a doll at you and, usually, looking solemn.

I haven’t seen the dolls in tourist stores, or being sold by any of the jewelry vendors on a street off the square. 

The women don’t set up a table in town and make dolls where people can see them doing the work, take pictures and perhaps buy more.

They do sell some dolls in La Pintada, which is a turnaround point for tourists who book horseback rides. But the marketing approach is the same, maybe slightly more alarming. A dozen or more kids, looking a little like the children of the corn, descend on visitors brandishing identical straw dolls.

It’s not far from institutionalized begging. I’ve seen tourists hand over money without taking a doll, which seems rude.

The other women’s co-op does weaving. Their work is good - we’ve got a couple of nice place mats on our table. But they only do place mats, table clothes and runners. And as far as I can tell, they only sell at the little co-op in the village of some 200 people.

The co-ops are a good idea. And the income is not to be scorned. The organization where my partner works is hosting a group from Tennessee helping to build ecostoves for families this week. (Less wood consumed, less smoke in the house - a very good thing, at about $60 a household.) About 15 of them rode up to La Pintada Saturday, and probably spent $20 on cornhusk dolls. That’s significant in a subsistence community, where many people have cash incomes of a few dollars a day.

But you have to wonder about the thinking behind the development project. It’s not enough to teach people how to make dolls, or help them buy a loom. You have to help them develop a plan to sell the goods.

The options seem obvious. The agency could have hunted out a storefront in Copan so some of the weaving could be done here, where tourists could see the work. 

It could have helped the weaving co-op come up with more products - bags, or shawls. It could do the same thing with the dolls, and figure out what sells - maybe a day of the dead collection, or Frida Kahlo cornhusk dolls, or Guadalupe, or Lady Gaga. Or creations based on the women’s lives.

Academic Lucy Ferguson looking at the gender implications of the projects in a 2007 paper. 

She identifies some of the problems. “The Women’s Council of CONIMCHH (Comite Nacional Indigena Maya Chortí) argue that in practice women’s groups are being held back, as they are only encouraged to produce artesanía, and not how to market or develop their products,” Ferguson writes. “There is little encouragement for Chortí women to work on their creativity or own designs, with workshops clearly directed towards particular standardised products.”

I am not slagging the enterprises. I like the cornhusk doll kids. They’ve seen me often enough to accept my claim that we have too many of the dolls already. The Internet was out in our house last week so I was in a bar with Wifi, and a little guy and I looked at pictures on my computer, some of his village, until he gave me a fist bump and went back to selling.

But a fair chunk of money went into these projects. People - development types - were well-paid to plan execute them.

It wouldn’t have cost any more to do it right.

Bad teeth, bad diet and hunger in Honduras

Early on, I was struck by the number of little kids here with bad teeth, often with a strange pattern of decay around the edges of their baby teeth.

A story in the newspaper offered a possible clue. Funazucar, the umbrella association of sugar producers, proudly announced it's donating 40 tonnes of sugar to a school lunch program for poor kids and to help nursing mothers with nutrition. Some 21,000 people, about 16,000 of them children, will benefit.

That works out to about 1.9 kilos of sugar per person. It's not a lot. The average North American consumes about 60 kilos of sugar a year, thanks to a heavily sweetened diet of processed foods and soda pop.

But the Honduran donation will be mainly used to add sugar to children's milk in the school lunch program. That seems like a bad idea.

The standard Honduran diet is already high in carbohydrates. About 70 per cent of the calories consumed - higher in rural areas - is from corn, used for tortillas, and beans.

People like both - it's a rare meal, breakfast, lunch or supper, that doesn't include tortillas and beans. They're cheap. And subsistence farmers can grow their own corn and beans, even on the steep, generally poor-quality land they can access.

That dependence is a problem. Poor farmers don't have irrigation, of course. They plant, as people have for hundreds of years, when the rainy season is supposed to start. If it doesn't, or there isn't enough rain, the crops do badly, as they did in southern Honduras this year. And when the crops are poor, people go hungry until the next year.

(Which, given the coming impact of climate change on corn and bean production, is very bad news for Honduras, and much of Central America.)

In Canada, kids seem big for their age. Here, I found myself guessing children were two years younger than they really were. About 29 per cent of Honduran children under five are stunted - they’re significantly too short for their age - and eight per cent wasted - they weigh significantly too little for their height. (Even the terms convey a certain desperation.)

Partly, it’s a matter of limited diet - too few fruits and vegetables. People are reluctant to give up any of a tiny cornfield for unproven crops.

Partly, it’s a symptom of more complex problems. Water sources in rural communities - home to about half the population - are often unreliable and impure. Diarrhea and parasites take a toll on everyone, but especially on little children. Families cook over smoky wood fires, often inside buildings. Children suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result.

People are working on the problems. Mission groups are installing water systems - though many fail within five years - and helping families build latrines to protect water sources. Agencies, including the one my partner works with, are helping families build ecostoves that use less wood and don’t fill the house with smoke. But progress is slow.

And partly, people just don’t have enough to eat. So sugar, with its quick energy and big calories, is a welcome addition - to kids’ milk, everyone’s coffee.

But sugar as a healthy additive to kids lunchtime milk?

I was already surprised, when I bought a bag of sugar at Bodega Gloria, to find the package proudly proclaimed “With added Vitamin A.” It seemed like trying to market soft drinks with added fibre. (Which Coke and Pepsi both already do in Japan.)

Back to bad teeth. That’s not just a question of diet. Toothbrushes and toothpaste are too expensive for poor families and dental care out of the question.

There are solutions. A U.S. university did a project where they taught kids in a poor rural community to clean their teeth with their fingers and salt and instructed teachers on twice-a-week fluoride rinses. A prominent community member was designated ‘Keeper of the Rinse’ and distributed it to teachers. There were problems, of course.

The baseline study, done before the program, found 83 per cent of the six to eight year olds had cavities. Eighteen months later, it was down to 14 per cent. (The samples were small; you can read about the study here.)

When you don’t have enough to eat, you take calories in whatever form you can get them. But sugar-laden milk - even when the sugar has added Vitamin A - doesn’t seem like a great nutritional step forward.

Long bus rides, and the high cost of lousy infrastructure in Honduras

A new bridge installation didn't go so well in Olancho last month; communities will continue to be isolated in the rainy season

I’ve made the trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital, a couple of times in the last few weeks. 

It take about eight and a half hours from Copan Ruinas, with a stop in San Pedro Sula to change buses.

It’s comfortable. Cuso encourages people to use Hedman Alas, a high-end bus line that makes a big deal about security. Airport-style check-ins, with hand baggage checks, a metal detector and a digital snapshot of every passenger. (I’m not sure how that is supposed to increase security, but I smile for the camera.) No stops along the way. And the buses are new, with comfortable seats, and an odd selection of movies. (Coming home on the weekend, I had Furry Vengeance with Brendan Fraser, whose presence is a reliable indicator that a movie will be bad, and The Reunion, a WWE-produced action vehicle for wrestler John Cena.) For a few dollars more, you can even go Ejecutivo Plus - sort of a bus business class.

Eight hours is still a long time. The distance between the two cities, as the crow flies, is about 220 kilometres. But Honduras is mountainous, and the roads follow the valleys where possible. 

The total travel distance is actually 435 kms.

The mathematically astute will have realized that means the average speed for the journey, mostly on the country’s main highways, is about 55 km/h.

The long trip to Tegucigalpa is no big deal for me. But for businesses that need to get there or make deliveries, it adds cost and time. For small producers, it’s a big barrier to getting goods and crops to urban markets. 

The problem is even worse off the main roads. By official count, Honduras has 14,296 kms of roads. Less than a quarter of them are paved - about 3,200 kms. A Peruvian economist who spoke in Tegus last week, Enrique Cornejo Ramírez, estimated that only 10 per cent of the road network is in fair condition.

The paved roads, with some exceptions, aren’t good: Potholes, washouts, never-ending construction.

Trucks ease by with two wheels on those logs

And the unpaved roads are much worse. They wind up steep hillsides and ford streams, and wash out in the rainy season and turn to dust in the dry. I was at a workshop on adding value for small farmers and co-ops. It was hard to talk about expanding markets or product differentiation when people’s first problem was that they couldn’t get their honey eight kms to the nearest town because the road was frequently impassable. When they can only sell locally, they face competition from all the other farmers growing the same things, and get lower prices.

Why are things such a mess? Hondurans point to Hurricane Mitch as a big factor, and it did result in massive damage to roads and wiped out bridges across the country in 1998.

Corruption is a problem. A newspaper story last month reported up to 25 per cent of government spending - including on infrastructure - is lost to various forms of corruption.(Before Canadians get too smug, remember the current Montreal construction corruption scandal.)

And Honduras just doesn’t have enough money. Work has halted on many of the current projects because the government hasn’t paid the companies in a couple of months. Tax loopholes and evasion reduce the money coming into government. (Teachers, for example, are exempted from income tax; companies show paper losses year after year and don’t pay tax.) Spending is routinely over budget. And IMF aid deals limit government borrowing. (Which, at interest rates around 11 per cent, is problematic anyway.)

It’s not just roads. The country’s main port is inefficient and outdated. There’s been talk of an airport for Copan Ruinas - which would make a huge tourism difference - for a decade, with no progress. 

And it’s not just transportation. The country’s phone company, Hondutel, is broke. Rural schools are substandard. In San Pedro Sula, with 1.9 million people, the Rotary Club is raising money to build the first public library. It’s been better lately, but for a couple of months power outages were routine in Copan, to the point that a group blockaded the road to Guatemala in protest. (Which seemed to help.)

And I’m writing this offline, because Internet service has been erratic for about 10 days.

This all goes far beyond inconvenience. Imagine trying to run a business, or any economic activity, when electricity is unreliable and transportation dodgy.

Once, it might not have mattered quite as much. Honduran businesses were local, shared the same handicaps and worked around them.

But Honduras, like so many countries has embraced freer trade as a route to more prosperity. Which means its businesses often face competitors operating in places with every infrastructure advantage.

Infrastructure tends to be a boring topic. Until it’s not there.

Honduras model cities plan ruled illegal

I've written about Honduras' model city plan several times, most recently here.

The idea, championed by the government, was to create new, privately owned cities from scratch. The owners would make their own laws and set up their own schools and police forces and courts. It would be like a do-over for the country, separate states within Honduras. The tacit admission was that Honduras couldn't fix its problems.

But the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled this week that the model cities law was unconstitutional, in part because it violated sovereignty by creating a country within a country. 

The idea is, for now, apparently dead.

The politicians complained about the decision. They argue that new, secure cities would result in investment and jobs.

As I've written, model cities have great risks. Owners are naturally going to make laws in the interests of big investors, not citizens, and basic principles of democracy and accountability are at risk.

But after nine months in Honduras, I was a lot more open to the idea than I would have been a year ago. As Bob Dylan wrote, when you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

One of the big problems is that a country trying the idea out of desperation likely lacks the skills and mechanism to provide proper oversight.

The first city was to be developed with no track record. A promised international oversight commission to ensure all was legitimate and rights were protected was never put in place.

Given the way the project was proceeding, the court decision was probably good for Honduras.