Going to the bathroom in Honduras

Those of you that have traveled in developing countries such as Honduras (and we don’t mean only the tourist spots that are like extensions of the US) have probably noticed that bathrooms are not the same. First of all, finding a public bathroom can be hard or downright impossible. If you do find one, you might realize that you have to pay to use it or at least pay to get toilet paper.

Here in Honduras, it is the same. When you go to a mall or nice shopping center in the big cities, you will find nice public bathrooms, and you can usually use them for free (and they may even have toilet paper). Outside of those and chain restaurants like McDonalds, bathroom quality tends to deteriorate at a fast rate. For example, the bus station we use to go to and from Tegucigalpa and Catacamas. It is considered a nice bus here in Honduras and is a direct bus with one stop in between (the buses do not have bathrooms either). But use the bathroom in the bus station and you will find that it is pretty gross compared to our standards in the US. There are toilets and a big urinal for the guys but no running water. You flush the toilet by pouring a bucket of water down it which you retrieve from a giant barrel located in the bathroom. If you have never done this, it actually works quite well but the cleanliness of the bathroom is pretty bad, even though they seem to be mopping it nonstop. Oh, and bring your own toilet paper, chances are that the bathroom will not have any but don’t worry, they usually sell some nearby if you get desperate.

We don’t have any numbers on this but less than half the population in Honduras probably has a flush toilet with running water. The next step is having a normal toilet that you pour a bucket of water down after using it, in or outside your house. One step lower and you have the standard latrine with a hole in the ground and a hole up above to do your thing in, an outhouse basically. After that, there are fields, streets, parks, and wherever else you need to relieve yourself. There are many poor subsistence farmers and families that either don’t have toilets or don’t have somewhere to go in the fields so people just go wherever and whenever nature calls. Well, that and cow dung are two of the main problems with water quality here in Honduras. In a country with a lot of rain, all that excrement just washes into the rivers that towns get their water from. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? But we will save that for another day and continue on.

The first time you see someone peeing in the street in broad daylight is somewhat shocking. Then after the fourth of fifth time you get used to it. It is not uncommon at all to see a car pulled over to the side of the road with a guy just peeing out in the open by his car, some people go behind on the tire or are a little more discreet but they don’t have rest stops here so you go wherever you need to. When Kevin went with the University students on a trip, the bus just pulled over and all the guys got out and basically lined up and peed on the side of the road. That is completely normal here. If a cop saw someone do that in the States, you could very well be cited and even charged as a sex offender, not good (you don’t want to end up on that website that tracks where sex offenders live just for peeing in public, do you?). This happens in the city too, not just in the country. The workers that come to get stuff from next to our house for the hardware store pee on the truck tires on the street in front of our house and we live in the middle of the city.

Now, peeing on the street in the open for guys isn’t a big thing. It’s not too often that you see a woman doing it. One way to avoid using the bathroom is to avoid drinking (Shannon does this every time we take a long trip). Hondurans, in general, don’t drink a lot of water. Most think gringos are weird for drinking so much water. We don’t know why, maybe because drinking water costs money or maybe its because there aren’t bathrooms to use but even people who are well off and can afford all the water they could possible want don’t drink very much water even though water is cheap. Our five gallon jug is just 65 cents. A liter bag of water is only 10-15 cents.

So far we have only talked about peeing in public. Other volunteers have told us about seeing people pooping in public but so far we had been able to avoid seeing that. That is until this morning. We went on our usual Monday morning run in the multi-sports complex/park, aka a giant grass field that we run around. On one of our laps around the field we could see a guy squatting just to the side of our path. It sure looked like his pants were down and as we got closer, sure enough, he was taking a dump on the ground about ten feet away from us. He didn’t seem worried about it and he didn’t seem to be drunk or on drugs either, just answering nature’s call in front of anybody who happened to walk by. I mean, couldn’t he have at least gone behind a tree or something or in a hole in the ground? The weirdest part might be how we reacted to that after living here a year. True, it was something we had not witnessed before but it almost seemed normal anyway. We just ran on by like normal and laughed and talked about how that was the first time we had seen that here. Hey, it all comes down to this: whey you gotta go, you gotta go.

On a side note, we are off to the Copan Ruins this weekend for Halloween, then to Guatemala and Belize for two weeks for some much needed vacation! Updates coming soon!

Post world cup qualifying comments by Kevin

If you have ever been outside the US and really soaked in the culture of another country, you probably learned that soccer is a huge sport. It is, after all, the most popular sport in the world. Living in the US, soccer is fourth, fifth or even sixth place among the most popular team sports (depending on who you ask). Ask a random person on the street to tell you the name of a player on the US men’s soccer team and they probably couldn’t. Ask them if the US men's team has qualified for the world cup and chances are they wont be able to tell you that either. Well, not so in other countries and Honduras is no exception. Soccer is huge here. It is easy to play and all you need is a ball to kick around. Any ball will do. Most kids use plastic balls on the street. Soccer balls like we are used to seeing in the states are rare here but you don’t need one of those to hone your skills as a youngster. Proof: Honduras with a population of 8 million people has a national team that is almost as good as the United States’ team, who has a population of over 300 million people (that is almost 40 times the population of Honduras!).
So, for anyone paying attention to the world cup qualifying currently going on, the United States and Honduras are in the same qualifying pool that covers all countries in the western hemisphere from Panama north and the Caribbean. Six teams were left in the last qualifying round with the top three automatically qualifying for the World Cup. With two games left to play Honduras was sitting in third position with a home game against the US that was played last Saturday (unfortunately we were unable to attend this game due to US embassy rules). The US ended up winning an exciting game 3-2, while Honduras missed a potentially game-tying penalty shot (had this been a Mexican player, he might have had a 50/50 chance of getting shot after the game). With this win, the US qualified for the world cup and the loss allowed Costa Rica to jump ahead of Honduras into third place with their win over Trinidad and Tobago. This put Honduras in a tough position to qualify as their last game was a road game in El Salvador and Costa Rica traveled to the US to play a team that had already qualified. Honduras needed to win the game and needed the US to win or at least tie Costa Rica.
So, Wednesday night, about 99.9% of the people in Honduras (including myself) were watching either the US/Costa Rica game or the Honduras/El Salvador game or both as they were played at the same time. Watching the US game seemed disappointing as Costa Rica took a 2-0 lead at halftime. Things weren’t looking good for Honduras. Honduras was tied 0-0 at the half and took the go ahead goal in the 63rd minute. The US finally scored a goal in the 72nd minute, sparking some hope for the Honduran faithful. Honduras hung on to the one goal lead to end the game beating El Salvador 1-0 as the US game was still being played in stoppage time. The US was still trailing 2-1. Things were looking pretty grim for Honduras with only stoppage time to remaining. At the end, all hopes rested on a final corner kick in the final seconds of stoppage time for the US. Chances looked slim. After the kick, coming out of nowhere was a wide open Jonathon Bornstein to head the ball past the Costa Rican goalkeeper for the game tying goal, essentially ending the game and allowing Honduras to automatically qualify for the world cup. Hondurans went ecstatic. (Costa Rica will play a two game playoff with Uruguay in which the winner will qualify for the World Cup and the loser stays home.)
Honduras has not qualified for the World Cup since 1982. Obviously, to a small country (it is about the size of Tennesee) that loves soccer this is a huge deal and to qualify for the World Cup again after 28 years was cause for celebration. (It was also nice for the people of Honduras to unite and celebrate for a good cause after all the political turmoil that has taken place in the last four months.)
I was watching the game at a new pizza restaurant in Catacamas with my fellow gringo Peace Corps Volunteer Jarryd (Shannon was in Tegus) when everyone heard (or saw) the US tie Costa Rica and everyone in the city started screaming and within a couple of minutes there was a parade of cars driving down the main streets of Catacamas. There were so many cars that when we tried to cross the street we had to wait a couple of minutes before we were able to run across the one lane, one-way street without getting hit by a car or motorcycle. Eventually it got so backed up that the cars (mostly trucks full of people in the backs) were barely moving, if at all. Everyone was honking their horns, screaming and yelling and more and more people kept coming out to celebrate. People were riding around on top of truck cabs, buses, anywhere they could fit. Hondurans would see Jarryd and I and start chanting USA-USA…, shaking our hands, giving us high fives and saying things like - thank you (in English), we love USA, hermanos para siempre, etc., etc. Everyone in Catacamas was our friend that night. One random guy gave me a full on hug. Everywhere we went people started screaming at us, girls were blowing us kisses, people were buying us beers. It was as if Jarryd and I ourselves were responsible for making Honduras qualify for the World Cup and we were seen as the town, if not national, heroes. At one point we even jumped in the back of one of the pickups with some random people and rode around for a few minutes celebrating with them. It was such an awesome and fun night, the most fun I have had in Catacamas since I have been here and I doubt that anything will top it. For at least one night, everyone’s problems seemed to disappear and everyone was celebrating together. It was a special night indeed. Crazy, but special.


Article title from the Honduran newspaper La Prensa the next day:

"I love you so much Jonathan Bornstein"

To hear the Honduran broadcasters at the end of the game listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjOv0rJYyF8
Just keep in mind how important that goal was as you listen. He is saying that the US game is not over yet when they realize the US scored and you can understand the goal part. Then he says Honduras is in the World Cup…

Latest things that are happening

We have been pretty busy the last few weeks. Last weekend we went to Lake Yojoa for a going away party for one of our good friends who decided to head back to the US a year early. It was our first good friend who had early terminated and it was sad to see him go. We’ve lost a couple of people from our training group in the past month. It’s always sad to see them go but we’re happy that they are doing what’s right for them. It was nice to relax at the lake for the weekend and spend time with friends that we hadn’t seen in awhile. Then Kevin went on to Tegucigalpa for his mid-service medical exams. He went to the dentist where he was told that he didn’t have any cavities but they did not even take x-rays so who knows… He was given a clean bill of health so that’s good. He came back the night of our anniversary and Shannon made a nice dinner. We have now been married three years!

We had our annual regional meeting last week where all of the volunteers from Olancho meet with the safety and security director of Peace Corps Honduras, the country director, and a nurse. It was an all day event and we both had to do presentations of what projects we have been doing. It was a long day but good to see everyone and we got to meet the two new volunteers in our area. It is the annual feria (fair) of Catacamas right now so we all went there after our regional meeting. It is pretty big with lots of booths, games, food, venders, and of course, rides. Last year we were afraid to go on the rides but this year we braved them. They are all just set atop wooden blocks and some have hand cranks to make them move, definitely not safe. The ferris wheel was actually scary…we thought they were supposed to be relaxing! It went really fast and was rickety and creaky but we survived it.

The political situation continues to be complicated as the ousted president is still in the Brazilian Embassy. Representatives of the two presidents have been meeting for “dialogue” but nothing has changed. The teachers found out last week that school is ending this coming Friday, the 16th. School is supposed to end at the end of November but since this is an election year it was well known that classes would end a little early like mid-November. Apparently they are ending a month earlier because the classrooms are needed for the elections. Nobody seems to understand why since the elections aren’t for another month and a half and they are on a Sunday… The teachers were also told that all kids have to pass which means that there are going to be a lot of kids next year who are behind. It is also a little crazy because this coming Monday is a holiday and Catacamas never has classes on Thursdays or Fridays so that leaves two days of classes for them to finish everything up. It also means that Shannon will, once again, not have anything to do.

On a happier note, the U.S. and Honduras played soccer against each other last night and the U.S. won! We had originally planned to go to the game but a week before the game the U.S. Embassy decided that it may not be safe for U.S. citizens to attend and prohibited any U.S. citizens who were affiliated with the “U.S. mission in Honduras” from attending. We were sad but had a few people over here instead and watched it on a projector on our wall. It was a good game and the U.S. is now qualified for the world cup! The downside is that Honduras will now have a hard time qualifying but they will at least be in the playoff spot to play the fifth place team from South America in a two game playoff to determine which one will qualify for the World Cup.

Shannon heads to Tegucigalpa this coming week for her mid-service medical exams and pretty soon we will head to Copan for Halloween and then on to Guatemala and Belize where we will explore Mayan ruins, climb active volcanoes and explore some Belizean beaches. Let the fun begin!