My Summer in Honduras (July-August, 2002)
Friar Timothy P. Dore, OFM Conv.
The following was written for the August, 2002 Newsletter of Helping Hands for Honduras.
See: http://www.handsforhonduras.org
As a Conventual Franciscan Friar and Roman Catholic priest I have had the opportunity to travel to and to live in many different places. As such, I have had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful country of Honduras a number of times during the past eight years. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the incredible material poverty evident everywhere in Honduras.
I am from a relatively large middle class family, and grew up in a typical home in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, I never imagined there could be people in the world who live without all the comforts of home I would have considered to be "normal." Even today in Honduras there are many people for whom running water, electricity, gas stoves, televisions, telephones and computers are simply not part of everyday life. For these people something as simple as getting routine medical attention is also an extraordinary event.
During my most recent visit to the Honduras I was able to go with Ron Roll, Chairman of Helping Hands for Honduras, to La Paz, Soledad, El Paraíso, a very small rural village in the southern Honduras, not far from the Nicaraguan border. The trip from the capital city of Tegucigalpa to La Paz involves a fifty four mile, three hour journey over mostly dirt and gravel mountainous roads. It is not possible to travel the complete distance without a four wheel drive vehicle.
Time seems to have stood still in La Paz. Ox carts are used to carry goods over deeply rutted dirt roads. Visiting the bathroom involves a trip to a rustic and not so pleasant outdoor latrine. People bathe with cold, spring fed water taken by buckets from mountain caves. Women labor over wood fired adobe stoves in order to cook tortillas, rice, eggs and beans for their families. Men work long and hard hours in the beating sun, cultivating crops and tending to livestock on rock strewn mountainside fields. For many children, completion of the sixth grade marks the end of formal education. Without electricity, people begin and end their days with the rising and the setting of the sun.
The way of life in La Paz definitely does not include those "normal" comforts of home that I knew as a child, and continue to enjoy as an adult, even as a Franciscan friar vowed to a life of "poverty." In spite of their great material poverty, the people of La Paz are full of life and have great hopes for the future.
Building on the hopes and dreams of the people of La Paz, Helping Hands for Honduras is sponsoring the construction of a health center (centro de salud). The health center will regularly serve over one thousand people, providing such basic services as medical consultations, pre natal care, a birthing room, dental work, and dispensing of general medicines. The project will definitely improve the quality of life of the wonderful people who live in this remote and very poor part of Honduras. I felt privileged to witness the making of the very first cement block to be used in construction of the center.
It was a great pleasure for me to spend some time visiting and working with the people of La Paz. Along with some other volunteers from the United States, namely Joseph Peters from Chicopee, Massachusetts and William Moore from Long Island, New York, I was happy to be a small part of the very enthusiastic beginnings of the health center's construction. If not for the generosity of the those who have backed this project of Helping Hands for Honduras, especially the people of the Rotary Club of Chicopee, Massachusetts, the site of the health center would still be just a barren rocky hilltop. It is good to know that people from my own country care about the well being and progress of people in developing nations. Because of what I witnessed at La Paz, I have a renewed confidence that the incredible material poverty of the Honduran people is slowly but surely fading into history.
