To prove that we are doing something down here while I´m busy not writing in my blog, here are some photos of the treatmet plant in Tamara a few days ago. We´ve been saying it will be up and running in “about a month” for about a month now, but I am still reasonably confident that by the end of May it will be up and running.
Working in Honduras: Two steps forward; one step back
Looking at the productivity of an average Honduran employee, at least looking at Agua para el Pueblo (APP) employees, it would be easy to conclude that they are not as productive as they should be. However, after being more or less a Honduran employee for 8 months, I am beginning to understand the reasons for this lack of productivity. It is not so much the fault of the Honduran employee as it is of the Honduran environment that they work in. The average Honduran spends half of his or her time working productively and the other half dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Honduras. These idiosyncrasies include crime, corruption, government bureaucracy, lack of public infrastructure, and lack of a modern financial system. They are all more reasons that “estamos fregados” here in Honduras. Below I will give a few examples of the idiosyncrasies of Honduras that I have come across.
Transportation
Last year, after returning from two months in Nicaragua, I wrote an opinion piece for the Cornell newspaper praising the public transportation system there. The Honduran transportation system is very similar to the Nicaraguan system, and I will now have to qualify my previous praise for this type of system.
The buses here are great if you want a nice view of the countryside, enjoy talking leisurely to the old lady sitting next to you, and get a rush from being one of 100 people packed into a bus designed for 70 small school children. However, if you are trying to make the most out of an 8-hour workday, and need to get somewhere for work without a car, the transportation system here is the bane or your existence. The buses, especially within Tegucigalpa, tend to be slow. During rush hour, they’re slow because of the traffic. Mid-day, when there’s not that much traffic, they’re slow because they stop and wait at every stop trying to pick up more passengers. While waiting at the stops to solicit more passengers, the busses block traffic and slow down everyone else on the road.
To get from Tamara to the APP office in public transportation, I take one bus and two collective taxis. The taxis are called collective because they run on routes and take multiple parties of passengers. They are essentially 4-person busses that are much faster than busses. All together, the trip costs about $1.75 and over 2 hours in traffic.
Because of the problems with public transportation and the fact that we need to haul materials, employees of APP normally travel in pickup or motorcycle. The AguaClara project has a pickup that we sometimes use to get back and forth from Tamara and the office. Even in a private car, however, it takes 1:40 to get from Tamara to the office during rush hour. The trip would normally take 50 minutes with no traffic.
Motor bikes look like the ideal way to get around in Tegucigalpa. They hardly consume any gasoline and can dart between the lanes of stopped traffic. Unfortunately, they also appear to be the most dangerous way to get around. About a month ago, three different people were killed in the same week in two different motor bike accidents on the highway to Tamara.
The traffic in Tegucigalpa is bad, but I’m not sure it’s that much slower than traffic in Minneapolis. The busses, although poorly run, help overall. They greatly reduce the number of vehicles on the road and fuel consumption. The biggest transportation problem might be that people often live far from where they work or go to school. If you live 20 miles from where you work, you should expect to waste a lot of time transporting yourself. As I explained in “Migration to Cities,” lack of employment and opportunity often force people who live far from the city to travel there to better their conditions.
Cash Transactions
Even though I spend far less money in Honduras than in the United States and am much more likely to be robbed here, I find myself walking around with a lot more cash here. If I go to Tegucigalpa to spend the night, I almost always have at least $75 with me. Nearly everything, including my rent and my food, must be paid in cash. Large stores, supermarkets and hotels in Tegucigalpa often accept credit cards, but I have never used mine here. I imagine personal checks exist, but I have yet to see one.
Since there is no bank in Tamara and there was no bank in Ojojona, we always do our transactions at a bank a couple blocks from the APP office. We are paid $1000 a month by direct deposit from an APP account into our savings account, and can use a passbook to take money out when we need it. I usually take out $200 or $300 about twice a month. Even though the APP office is in one of the safest areas of Tegucigalpa, I always feel a little uncomfortable walking out of the bank with money. Luckily, the office is only a couple blocks away.
APP pays its employees with checks but still must do some cash transactions. Daisy, one of the office workers, told me that when she first started working for APP she was sent to the bank with 14,000 Lempiras (now about $740) and was robbed. She and Deborah, the woman who sent her with the money, had to pay it back to APP from their paychecks over a long period of time. This sounds like a pretty harsh policy to me, but it might be common in Honduras. I heard that bank tellers are also responsible for any missing money at the end of the day.
Wilfredo, the APP engineer we work with, said a neighbor of his was recently robbed of $3000 while leaving the bank. Her husband is and the states and had been saving up to send her the money a long time. She went to the bank to receive the transfer and took it out in cash to exchange it for Lempiras and pay bills with it. Now she is left with nothing.
Yesenia, a friend of Carol’s in Ojojona, runs a business packaging spices in little bags and reselling them to pulperias (local general stores). She was in the market in Tegucigalpa last year and was robbed of 10,000 Lempiras (about $530), a large sum of money for most people here. She is still recovering financially from the loss.
Naaman, one of our co-workers at APP, told us of how he once had to give the slip to two men who had followed him out of the bank after he withdrew over $1000. To withdraw large sums of money, you must make and appointment with the bank and tell them where you are headed with the money. He said an employee of the bank had probably informed the men of how much money he had and where he was going. He realized the men were following him in their car, got behind them, and headed in a different direction when they turned off toward his original destination.
Reina’s daughter Johanna picked up 5000 Lempiras (about $260) from her sister’s boyfriend Oscar in the market in Tegucigalpa last week. The money was for Reina’s niece, who is pregnant and used it to buy things for the baby girl she’s expecting. Someone else had probably dropped the money off with Oscar. Oscar is a bus driver and was on a moving bus when in plain sight he handed Johanna the money through the window. No one robbed her, but I can’t imagine running around the dangerous market with that kind of money is a safe thing to do.
A big part of some people’s jobs is carrying around money. It’s very common to see someone, usually a bank employee, hurrying through downtown Tegucicalpa with a bag, surrounded by two armed guards. Some people don’t have such protection. On the dirt road up where we’re building the water treatment plant in Tamara, there is a commercial chicken farm. One afternoon, at least a few years ago I think, a man was bringing money for the payroll and was robbed and killed on the road.
The water board in Tamara currently employs about 20 laborers working on the construction of the treatment plant and the installation of new water pipe in the community. The workers are paid in cash weekly at the house of the treasurer of the water board. Since each worker makes 720 Lempiras a week, this means that there are about 14,000 Lempiras (about $740) at the house of the treasurer every Saturday morning. Nothing has happened so far, and the treasurer doesn’t seem to be too worried, but in a country where 14,000 Lempiras is well worth stealing, this is a risky situation.
These are incidents and situations that have come up in conversation just in the last month. When I hear these stories, I think of the stagecoach robberies that were common over a century ago in the western United States, when stagecoaches were used to transport large sums of money. It is clear that having to do business in cash causes a lot of danger and hardship for Hondurans. Fortunately, I never walk around with anything I can’t afford to lose. Most Hondurans aren’t so lucky.
Government Bureaucracy
The Honduran government does not work quickly. To do anything involves a lot of trámite (procedural paperwork). The few transactions we have had to do with the government have been very time consuming.
The tourist visa U.S. travelers are given in the Honduran airport only lasts for 3 months. After that, you must leave and reenter the country, or apply for residency. Our work with APP is justification for temporary residency, so from the first couple weeks we were here, APP started working on getting us residency papers. The director of APP had a connection in the immigration office, so they thought that would make the process easier.
Four months later, we had been given a 1-month extension and were still working on getting the residency papers together. Every time we went to the immigration office they told us we needed something else. First a letter from the mayor of Ojojona; then they had lost our records and needed new copies; then we needed to pay a fee; then we needed two small photos of ourselves; then another fee. None of the hoops were very hard to jump through, but it would have been nice to know about them beforehand.
The customer service at the immigration office didn’t help. There was never anyone at the desk we needed to go to. Sometimes it would take a half an hour to get attention, even though there wasn’t really anyone in front of us. It appeared that they were all hiding behind the divider wall where we couldn’t see them. Most of the customers at the immigration office were lawyers. We were some of the few amateurs trying to get their papers through.
Getting a Honduran drivers license didn’t take as long as getting residency, but was more difficult than it would be in the United States. The first day we went to the transit office, the computer system was down, so we were not able to finish the process. That worked out okay though, because they were asking for small photos again, and we had not brought those. A week later we called the office and learned that the computers were fixed. After about 3 hours, including an hour when the computer was down, I had my license. They even printed the plastic card right there that day, a step up from Minnesota. Carol’s residency card and U.S. license had been stolen recently (more on that later), so she was tied up for a couple more hours. We were fortunate that we were getting our licenses for the first time. The line for renewals, where most Hondurans were waiting, was far longer and looked like it would take almost the whole day.
We now have our drivers’ licenses, but the car we drive still does not have plates. APP bought the car in November, and Antonio has been to the agency several times trying to get the permanent plates. They just keep giving us temporary documents. There must be some sort of problem with the history of the car-it is used-but we are not sure what.
Not only foreigners have trouble with government bureaucracy in Honduras. I have heard that normal identity cards are also very hard to get. Teenagers waiting to get their first identity card often have to wait in line all day. A couple months ago a group of young people from Tamara went on a bus trip to get their identity cards in Tegucigalpa. The trip was organized by a congressman who probably had connections in the identity card office that would allow them to get their identities more quickly. He was surely doing this in hopes of winning votes from the people he helped out.
Crime
Carol had a more difficult time getting her license because her wallet had been stolen on the bus to Ojojona, along with her U.S. drivers’ license and Honduran residency card. Her wallet was in the pocket of a bag that she put in the luggage rack above the seats. Since the bus was filling up and we were standing, we were pushed toward the back. She left the bag where it was, and later that night realized that someone had pulled her wallet out of it.
Since she only had copies of her license and residency card, Carol had to get special permission to get her Honduran license. To get this permission, she and Antonio had to go to another office to file a crime report. Later, they returned to the transit office to finish the process. In the morning, we had arrived early and had parked inside the office parking lot. However, when they returned from filing the crime report they had to park on the street because the lot was full. After they realized it would take Carol awhile to get her license, Antonio decided to leave her there and return to the office. When he arrived at the office, Antonio realized that someone had stolen the spare tire from the bottom of the car. This is a common occurrence in Tegucigalpa. Multiple spare tires have been taken from APP cars right in front of the APP office.
While Carol was at the immigration office trying to get a new residency card to replace the one that was stolen from her, Antonio spent the afternoon looking for a new spare tire. Luckily in Tegucigalpa, used tires are easy to find. He went to one of the sleaziest areas of town and found a used spare for pretty cheap. We joked that he was probably buying the new tire from the same guy who had stolen ours that morning.
Strikes
A couple weeks ago we had a meeting planned in Tegucigalpa for leaders from communities that are potential sites for future treatment plants. The meeting was planned for a Thursday, but we showed up in the office Wednesday to find out there was a national strike and protest planned for Thursday. Nearly all of the activist groups in the country were uniting to protest low wages and high prices. They planned to block the highway entrances to Tegucigalpa and other major cities. This would likely block bus transportation.
I had heard several threats for strikes before and they hadn’t materialized to much, but by the afternoon everyone was still saying it would happen. Since all of the people coming to our meeting would be traveling from outside of Tegucigalpa by bus or car, many started to call and cancel. We ended up postponing the meeting one day to Friday. Only about half of the communities who had confirmed for Thursday showed up Friday. This drop in interest may have been because of the strike, or might have happened anyway.
Driving into Tegucigalpa from Tamara Thursday morning, we realized the protest was the real deal. Soldiers and police were at the ready along the highway. When we reached a major interchange near the center of the city, the police were sending everyone in the other direction. We had to drive a circle around the entire city, encountering one more large roadblock, before finally arriving at the office. Needless to say, hardly anyone working in Tegucigapla got much done that Thursday.
In Conclusion:
Working in Honduras is an experience full of excuses, most of them legitimate. You never feel like you’re working at 100% because you spend half of your time dedicated to dealing with the idiosyncrasies you face simply because you are working and living in a developing country. So if it sounds like we’re not getting much done down here, just keep in mind that we spend 4 hours every day sitting in traffic, waiting in line in government offices and being robbed.
