Satori in Honduras

Just as the torrential daily downpours were striking our modest Honduran abode yesterday, I was curling up with a book in the hammock. This particular book was a Peace Corps publication from back in the day (early 1990s I think) where former volunteers write stories and antidotes regarding their service as volunteers. As I read page after page of stunning descriptions of volunteer life in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in time periods ranging from the early formative days of the Peace Corps experiment until the early 1990s, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy that colored my mood for the rest of the evening. The rest of the night I turned over the collective experiences of the authors and compared them to our current lives, and I felt like we are coming up a little short.

Before I confuse the issue, let me explain myself further. Envy is a tricky word that might give you the impression that something is currently ¨wrong¨ with our service. Nothing is actually farther from the truth. My sense of envy is not related to our geographical position which is ideal, nor our work which is perfect (music and baseball are officially our jobs now) nor Honduras, for which I grow more fond daily. In fact, really the only issue that I could find is time. Having always looked for a way to revisit life in the states before it started sprawling out of control, I assumed that Honduras would be void of our current forms of progression.

The world is developing at a tremendous rate, which is obvious in the states, but is also becoming apparent in the developing world as well. I read descriptions of volunteers who lacked electricity, who cooked their meals over fires, and who depended upon motorcycles as the only form of transportation. In stark contrast, crystal and I have a cell phone, cable TV, and six places with internet in our community (none of those three are currently working today as the fates would have it, but that is beside the point). The idea that I harbored about living and working in a technologically primitive atmosphere where nobody would ever have heard of coca cola was not only idealistic, but utterly impossible.

Honduras, like a great deal of the developing world today, is a land of stark and often strange contrasts. We daily encounter people using mules as beasts of burden, but then often see on the same street teenagers with the same snazzy cell phones that you are using in the states (and which, comically, we can’t afford). Half of our town lives on paved roads, the other half live in houses of dubious building materials including mud and sticks. And honestly, there are certain traditional methods that still exist, as made explicit by our neighbor’s wood burning stove which cooks their food (even if their other neighbors may have a microwave). The material contrasts may be more obvious in Honduras today, but the traditional methods of life still exist, just as it did for the volunteers before us.

The more that I got to thinking about the differences in the stories I read and the experience that we are having, the more I realized the commonalities within the Peace Corps which have spanned the barrier of time and maintained their relevance. Like the stories of volunteers that I read, Crystal and I interact with Hondurans daily, and the cultural exchange that results is both beautiful and beneficial. Also, we are constantly working hand in hand with Hondurans to address areas of improvement that they identify within their own culture. And that may be the true beauty of the Peace Corps, is that despite the cell phones and internet, that these goals are still achieved.