Run-in with a Honduran Cop

       After hearing so many stories of crooked cops, it was inevitable that we would run into one eventually. Some Hondurans joke that instead of feeling safe when police are around you have to be extra careful so that the police themselves don’t rob you. Because police are poorly paid, they are often looking for a way to supplement their salary. The general opinion seems to be that rather than stopping people to keep the roads safer, traffic police stop people to pester them and extort bribes from them.

            For a couple of do-gooder gringos, Carol and I have a nasty habit of driving without our licenses. Or, more specifically, Carol has a habit of getting caught driving without a license. When we started driving the car, we thought that our licenses from the United States would work here. It turned out that those licenses expired once we had been in the country for three months and that we had to apply for Honduran ones. While in the process of applying for our Honduran licenses, we were stopped many times at police check points. The AguaClara pickup was new and had a temporary registration instead of plates, so that made us even more likely to be stopped. Somehow, Carol managed to sweet-talk more than one cop into letting her off without a fine.

            Last Saturday, however, when Carol had forgotten her license at home and was driving in Tegucigalpa, the cop wasn’t hearing any of her excuses. Honduran law says that the penalty for driving without a license is confiscation of the vehicle and a couple days in jail. I find it hard to believe many people get that penalty. The policeman who stopped her was willing to let me drive the car away (I had my license, but somehow we hadn’t realized that I should be driving instead of Carol), confiscate my license, and give the 1300 Lempira ($69) fine that he should have given to Carol to me. This wasn’t ideal, since I would have the fine on my record and would have go to the transit office to get my license back, but it sounded like the best way out.

            Then Cop #1 passed us off to Cop #2. Cop #2 had another idea. I had already moved into the driver’s seat. Moving to the passenger window, he told me to roll up my window (so passing drivers wouldn’t see). Then he started playing “Let’s make a deal.” He made it clear that he would like to find an easier way to resolve this issue so that we and he wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of him taking my license. He kept asking if we had any ideas of how we could resolve the problem. We played dumb. Then he suggested that we help put some gas in his patrol car and we forget about the whole thing. I don’t know if he thought we would go to the gas station with him, or if he wanted us to siphon diesel out of our car, but we weren’t buying the deal. I told him that if he could let us go with just a scolding that was great, but that if he had to take my license and give us a fine, that that was just fine too. After we frustrated him for about 15 minutes he gave up and told us we could be on our way. Apparently he wasn’t really up for the hassle of taking my license and writing a ticket. Better to spend his time trying to get a kickback from the next car.

Finally, an Update

     It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on my blog and a lot has happened since the last entry. In early June we completed the Tamara water treatment plant and started treating water. The day we started applying chemicals the plant was functioning within minutes of turning on the chemicals. Crystal clear water was coming out of the exit within a couple hours. That day I was convinced that these things we are building really do work pretty darn well. It was satisfying to fill my water bottle with the crystal clear water falling into the storage tanks. Moncho, the vice president of the water board, filled up a bottle of the treated water to proudly show to the rest of the water board and other people down in town.

On June 15 we inaugurated the Tamara water treatment plant. Monroe, the Cornell professor who is founder and director of AguaClara, was in Honduras for the event and the water board put on quite a show. The entire community was invited and lunch was served to all. A local string band played for several hours and there were even a few people dancing (including myself believe it or not) under the midday sun. Bringing a couple hundred community members up to see the plant will surely make the users more conscientious about paying the water tariff. Unlike in Ojojona, the Tamara water board has already raised the water tariff to 50 Lempiras ($2.65) from 35 Lempiras ($1.85). On a side note, after 10 months of community meetings and our prodding, the Ojojona water board also finally raised the water tariff enough to sustainably operate the treatment plant there.

The completed Tamara treatment plant.

Carlos, the plant operator.

The inauguration.

The live band.

The plaque.

Carlos, a resident of Tamara who worked on the plant construction from start to finish, is now the plant operator there. He is currently serving day and night and doing a great job. Hopefully the water board will contract someone to help him soon since being responsible for the plant 24/7 is far too taxing for a long-term job, especially for one that currently only pays about $210 a month. We will continue to be in Tamara at least a couple times a week to train Carlos and make sure the plant is working.

At this point, my year here would be winding down to a close. However, the home stretch has quickly turned into the middle. Since there was an opening for next year, I have decided to stay another year in Honduras working on the AguaClara project with Agua Para el Pueblo. I like the country, the people and the work and am looking forward to another year.

Since our work in Tamara is winding down and we are spending more and more time working in the office, I vacated my cement-block penthouse in Tamara a couple weeks ago and moved to the big city. I was startled to realize that Tamara had been my home for a full half-year, significantly more time than I spent in Ojojona. Without fail, when I told Hondurans that I lived in Tamara, they always cringed a little bit. The valley of Amarateca, where Tamara is located, is known to most Hondurans as the home of the national prison, a national psychiatric hospital, and several dangerous communities (projects) of people displaced from Tegucigalpa by hurricane Mitch. What they don’t know is that the actual village of Tamara is nice little community with history and very friendly people. I was even big buds (not really, but he always had a friendly hello and handshake for me) with Monchito, the local thief and drug addict. I always felt welcome in Tamara, recognized most people that I saw there, and will remember my time there as a good time.

While Tamara is known as the armpit of the region surrounding Tegucigalpa, some Hondurans will tell you that Tegucigalpa itself is the armpit of Honduras. Tegucicalpa has commerce, history and educational opportunity, but it also has its share of beggars, crime, pollution and general dirtiness. Along with these drawbacks, I’m hoping that I also will find more to do, a more active social life, and a new perspective on life in Honduras.

So far I feel extremely lucky to have found the place where I’m living. When looking for a house, I decided I wanted to live in a barrio (neighborhood) called La Guadalupe, because it is close to downtown, only blocks from the Agua para el Pueblo office where we work, and has a reputation as being pretty safe. Unfortunately, it looked like everyone else wanted to live in La Guadalupe too, because everywhere I looked all of the rooms for rent and apartments were full. From what I see, most landlords don’t advertize in the papers, so the best way to find a place is asking around at pulperias (neighborhood convenience stores) and looking for signs. Walking down the street I saw an open door with a friendly looking girl inside and I asked her if she might know where I could find an apartment. She referred me to “Dr. Ruth” who lived next door. I knocked next door but there was no answer. I had pretty much forgotten about the place till later that day when I passed again, I remembered and knocked. “Dr. Ruth” answered and it turned out she had a room.

I am renting a decent-sized room with a private bathroom next to it on the third (top) floor of her large though slightly rundown house. Dr. Ruth is the 60 yr old or so daughter of an Austrian Jew and German Jew who came to Honduras fleeing the Holocaust. She studied chemistry and pharmacy in Mexico, worked four years in the U.S. and raised her five children here in La Guadalupe. She now lives alone when her children are not visiting her.  Dr. Ruth works out of her house as a homeopathic doctor, treating one or two patients a day with natural medicine she orders from France, where one of her daughters is studying marine biology. Ruth is a bit of a character, and is certainly not your typical Honduran, but I think I will enjoy living with her. She seems well respected in the neighborhood and has welcomed me openly into her house.

The street I live on in Tegucigalpa.

Another view of the street.

 

The entrance.

The hallway outside my room.

My new room.

 

My mini-kitchen.

 

The bathroom.

 

The shower.

 

No Honduran home is complete without a pila.

 

The terrace outside my room.

Views from the terrace.

 

With my roof taken care of, I set out with Dr. Ruth to find where I might be able to eat dinner most of my nights in La Guadalupe. There are plenty of restaurants around, but I was hoping to find a family I could eat with, or at least a restaurant small enough so that I could get to know the owners and come every night. At first Dr. Ruth showed me all of the restaurants I had already been to, but finally a neighbor recommended a young man named Reniere who makes meals and delivers them to people’s houses. Although his house isn’t large, he said I could come eat dinner in his kitchen when I want. It turns out Reniere once worked for a week for Dr. Ruth as a taxi driver when she managed a fleet of taxis. He the single father of two children, Brian (4) and Adrian (2). He is separated from the children’s mother and the kids live with him. Reniere has lived in La Guadalupe for over 10 years and a lot of his extended family lives in the same block as him. Reniere has nearly always been self-employed, and he started his latest venture, carry-out food, just a couple weeks ago. He has already purchased a motorbike on credit and seems to be doing quite a bit of business. He likes the work because it allows him to be at home with his sons.

After the finishing the treatment plant in Tamara, we do not have any funding to start another project. To make matters worse, some of the funding for Tamara, money that APP has already spent, is still on its way to APP’s bank accounts. Currently, we are operating at minimum capacity and hoping that we find a project soon enough so that APP can continue to pay the salaries of Antonio and Wilfredo, the APP technician and engineer we work with. Although we have very little money, we have plenty of work to do supporting Carlos and the Tamara plant and looking for funds for future plants. We are applying for $100,000 from Rotary to build two or three more plants starting in January, and Monroe is busy looking for donations to get one plant started in the next month or so. The good news is that $33,000 arrived from the U.S. last week to cover my and the other Cornell intern’s salaries for next year.

Carol will be ending her work at APP in early August and heading back to the states. Tamar, another Cornell engineering grad and friend of mine from Engineers for a Sustainable World, arrived a week ago to replace her. Tamar is also renting a room from Dr. Ruth. With moving to Tegucigalpa, the future of the AguaClara project a bit up in the air, and a new co-worker arriving, it’s safe to say that the month of July has been a time of transition for. I’ll be coming home to Minnesota for the last half of August and hope that when I return in early September we will know what the last few months of the year will entail for AguaClara.