Letter from Honduras

by Nessa Williams

I have been here now for three months and this is my first news letter to you all back home. I have settled in very well and can already tell that Roatan will always be a second homeland to me.

The island is about 30 miles long and has two main towns, French Harbour and Coxenhole, and a few villages/settlements - Sandy Bay (where we live), West End (where the tourists live), Punta Gorda (where the native Caribs or Garifuna live) and Oak Ridge (where Sandy Bay men go searching for women). Coxenhole is where Roatan Bilingual school, the school where I teach, is situated. Coxenhole is the main town of the island and has a mainly black population. It is not tourist centred and although most of the time it is dismissed as a 'hole', I find it genuine and real, which is more than can be said for parts of West End. Houses in the town are predominantly wooden and built on silts to combat sandflies, mosquitoes, stray dogs, tarantulas and land crabs. Some houses are beautifully painted, turquoise green, powder blue and peach; some houses are architectural feats, held up in part by rotting timber and in part by the will of God and the hopes of the people living in them. Coxenhole is a real town and with it come real people, children with bellies swollen by malnutrition, big women who sit on their balconies and chatter (when they are not in church or chastising their children) and taxi drivers who won't take no for an answer and whose call 'West End, West End, Sandy Bay?' drives you insane after a while.

The smell of Coxenhole is certainly not the most pleasant I have ever experienced - a sweet and syrupy combination of rotting fruit and sewage that gets worse on hot days. Coxenhole also has it's more sinister side, along Calle Ocho, or 8th Street, so called supposedly because you can walk along it and ask the price of an 8th of an ounce of cannabis and get different answers at all the vendors. It is here that the 30 lempira girls stand and where, on one of our more dubious hitches, our driver stopped and handed a gun out of the window saying 'I'll pick it up tomorrow morning!

The school, where we lived for 2 months, is just on the outskirts of the town and was founded in 1983 because a group of parents were concerned about the poor standard of education being offered by the Honduran government. For a start, all state schools are Spanish speaking, which is inappropriate for the Bay Islands because the first language is English. Most people speak both Spanish and English but there is certainly still a need for a bilingual system. State schools are drastically underfunded and private schools, although they rarely make a profit, can at least provide books and properly qualified teachers. I was originally supposed to be working as a kindergarten assistant but they sneaked in quite a few lessons, what with one thing and another, so now I'm teaching: 2nd grade (7-9yrs) twice a week, 2nd grade Drawing once a week, 1st grade (6-8yrs) Music and Drawing, 6th grade Maths everyday and 7th grade Maths everyday too. Due to the Honduran system where by students have exams at the end of each academic year, if a student doesn't pass, they stay in the same grade until they do. I therefore have several seventh grade who are almost as old as me and the boys are mostly tall and scary with moustaches! Unfortunately, as they are the ones who have failed the most, they are also the ones with the worst attitude problems.

We were warned before we came about the discipline problems in Honduran schools and I have to say that everyone was absolutely right. Prime examples include Xavier, a 4yr old in kinder, Fernando,a first grader and Lenny in 6th grade. Xavier is Hispanic and his mother is a doctor. When you tell him to sit down/do his homework/stop scribbling/pick something up off the floor, he just looks at you and says 'si', really forcefully, and then carries on doing whatever it was he was doing before! Fernando did not go to kindergarten and has not practised how to behave in the classroom. He knows no English, so in music lessons he runs round the classroom while everyone else is singing, hiding under desks and generally paying no attention at all to me.

Lenny is an island boy (black) and very charismatic. He has failed sixth grade a few times and is obviously getting bored. He spends his lessons professing his love for his female classmates and talking about all sorts of things apart from his work. He also sings and dances very well in my lessons, which is distracting to say the least. Generally, however, I enjoy teaching and the children are mostly friendly and loveable.

Sandy Bay, where our house is, is a small village spread out for miles along the edge of the water. It has a very low 'gringo' population and a nice community spirit. The wooden houses contain millions of children and nearly every household owns at least one dog, one cat and normally one pig. These animals are often very thin and undernourished because they are left to fend for themselves.

When we are not in school we are out having adventures on the island, usually at West End where the tourist industry is booming. My favourite place at West End is a bar called ' Sam's' which has easy chairs for looking at the stars, hammocks and a flood-lit volleyball court. Sam's is owned by Sam Miller a very important man in West End who has about 25 children. The family he is with now has 6 children: Lonnie (23), Louin (24), Stacey (20), Coonie (18), Bornadeth (17), and Barnie (15). Sam has named all of his children and many of his nieces and nephews too!

One of the most exciting parts of living on Roatan is hitching rides with the millions of pick up trucks. Hitching is relatively safe because the island is so small and everyone knows everyone else (and is usually their cousin!) Let me tell you about the rides we have had:

1) We had one ride from Coxenhole to Sandy Bay in the back of a truck with two goats.
2) We went from French Harbour to Coxenhole in a very dilapidated truck with about 1 tonne of bruised bananas.

3) We tried to hitch a ride with a hearse, much to our embarrassment when we saw the truck stop at the top of the hill for the coffin to be carried to the cemetery.

4) We got stopped by some policemen, while we were walking and hitching to West End, who said 'There will be a car coming in a minute which we can get you a space in.' They proceeded to stop the next car that came along the road and ordered them to take us where we wanted to go!

Other adventures include being taken out to dinner by Bonnie Jackson, who literally owns half the island, snorkelling at night time and seeing a 6ft long moray eel, being taken crab catching by locals (a pastime which island boys spend a lot of their youth participating in) and watching Casablanca at the local 'cinema'.

One thing I have noticed, which contrasts quite dramatically with life in England, is the treatment of women. If you wish to have a relationship with an Island man, the men expect to have sex with you first and then build up a relationship from this. They find it strange if you want to be 'along' with them but won't have sex. They are very hypocritical about how they deal with 'cheating' in a relationship. If a woman cheats on her man then the man will break off with her. However men regularly cheat on their women and do not see any reason why they shouldn't.

Many men and women on the island belong to the 'Church of God', a strict evangelical sect of Christianity. They go to church every Sunday, don't drink, don't smoke and don't wear jewellery and yet men are still unfaithful to their girlfriends (threatening both themselves and the women with AIDS ) and they still own guns, which they use periodically when drunk or feeling threatened. I question this moral order and it worries me that with AIDS so prevalent, the Island men can threaten their community in such a way without realizing it.

I have many more things which I would love to write about but I am afraid this is all I have time for. Thank you for your donations. I hope you will feel that your money has been wisely invested.

15 November 1995

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