The Simmy Sagas

A view of Valle de Angeles on our hilly commute

Valle de Angeles, known colloquially as “the valley,” is a municipality in the Honduran department (country division) of Francisco Morazán. At an elevation of 4200 feet and located between Honduras’s mountain ranges, it has the coolest climate in the whole country and is truly the one real retreat from the dangerous capital of Tegucigalpa, which is less than an hour’s drive south-southwest of the valley. There is literally only one road into the town from the south, and none of the streets have names or are even recognized on Google Maps, though someone has made a somewhat interactive map of the town. We pass by the field above every day on our 15-minute walking commute to the downtown where La Finca is.

Downtown Valle De Angeles

Valle de Angeles has many tourist souvenir shops and restaurants, though you have to watch what you eat. Safe precautions for food preparation at home include cooking only with purified water, vegetables that have been soaked in chlorine water, and dishes that need to be rewashed with boiled chlorine water since taps don’t have hot water. The local water isn’t even safe enough to brush teeth with.

Town Center, Valle de Angeles

Most stores don’t open until 10a.m. and everyone takes siestas. A pretty park at the center of town highlights the laid back attitude of the locals who spend plenty of time relaxing. Youngsters hang out in the park, mothers watch their children play, and men chat after work. On Sundays, the park is flooded with tourists from Tegucigalpa. Once, I happily sighted a woman reading a book in the park. Aside from her, I have seen no one in the town reading anything. There are no newspapers or bookstores, only one low-key souvenir shop with a short stack of over-used over-priced Honduran short story books.

Honduran HSBC ATM

Considering there are no HSBC ATM’s in Boston, I was surprised to find one in the corner of Valle de Angeles’s park under a tree. However it does not accept MasterCard, and there is only one other ATM in the whole town.

Expresso Americano

A Central American take on Starbucks, Expresso Americano is a chain from Tegucigalpa and the only cafe in the traditional sense in Valle de Angeles. I became addicted to their Mochaccino Supreme, but the pastries always tasted a little stale.

Dayana and Jamie

A few years ago, Jamie’s family met Jose, an old Catholic man who hikes the mountains giving aid to the poor, elderly, and anyone in need. Through him, they were introduced to Dayana, a now fifteen-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who lives in a poor quarter of Valle de Angeles. Dayana was crawling on the ground when they first met her, so Jamie’s family tried to get her a surgery. A long story short, Jamie’s Dad happened to get a ride from Tegucigalpa with a physical therapist who introduced him to a beneficent local doctor who performed the operation on her legs completely for free. Afterwards, Jamie’s family brought the Catholic and Evangelical congregations together, who usually do not communicate with each other, for a celebration of Dayana’s advancement.

Duyana Writing

All her life, Dayana said she had dreamed of having the ability to walk. After her surgery, two physical therapists, a boyfriend and girlfriend, walked to her house twice a week to help her recover and teach her to walk. She now uses a walker to move, but she can take steps on her own as well. She can also write, though her fingers are crooked and the process is difficult and time-consuming. Her drawings are excellent, though, and she draws landscapes from memory without having to look at anything.

Dayana's Mom

Before Dayana’s surgery, her mother used to carry her to school every day. The mother is wonderful to all her children and was very grateful for the help Jamie gave. When we brought food for her family, she offered to cook. I noticed that she wore the same shirt both days we visited, which was probably her best one. Their house only has one door, curtains to separate “rooms,” and open rectangular holes with no glass or shades for windows.

Dayana's Education in Frames

Dayana’s family not only views education seriously, but also takes great pride in their educational accomplishments. Above the family’s bed are her diplomas and pictures from school. I was astonished at how intelligent and mature Dayana is. She saw my notebook with English-Spanish translations and expressed interest in learning, so we went over a few English phrases, some of which she already knew. We communicated well, and she looked up words in a dictionary when we couldn’t understand each other.

School Supplies For Anthony

On the first day we visited, Jamie brought personalized baggies of school supplies for Dayana, her sister, and her two brothers. Jamie says that erasers and pencil sharpeners are like gold in Honduras.

Honduran Stove

Their stove consists of what I assume is a metal surface, a stove pipe, and tiles with cement packed around a hole for firewood. Jamie and Lilly noticed there was no food on their stove for dinner the first day, so Jamie decided we would return the next day with food.

Banasupro

We went to a local store to buy the family rice, beans, eggs, flour, cheese, bread, milk, corn flour, nenteca (shortening), butter, soup, spaghetti, tomato sauce, sardines, toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, paper towels, and dish detergent.

Dayana's Yard

The family was very grateful for the food and supplies. We learned that the father is very sick and has not been able to provide for the family lately. While Jamie talked with the family, the sister gave me a little tour of their property. There are many fruit trees on their slope (papaya, banana, orange, and some unidentifiable ones), so thankfully the family can be somewhat self-sustaining while the fruit is in season.

Daisy, La Finca

La Finca is a home for abandoned children. It houses about 100 children from ages 2 to 18, only one of which is actually an orphan. Every day when I return to Jamie’s home, I try to write about the children, but it’s been difficult to know where to start. I could list my observations of the children, but no collection of descriptions accurately documents how well they children deal with their tough life situations, how much less they have than others in terms of family and wealth, and how, after all, they are just kids. Daisy, an ever-smiling two-year old, is among a group of children recently transferred from a state orphanage. It’s easy to tell the new kids apart from the rest, since they typically have not yet learned to share toys and people’s attention. Also, at the state orphanage, hitting is needed to survive, but a few weeks after arriving at La Finca they learn to adapt and look out for each other.

Natalie and Me

As a newcomer and non-English speaker, I do get special treatment. When I arrived with my backpack a little more stuffed than the previous day, the children were saying to each other “mochila, mochila” (backpack, backpack) while asking me to lift them up so that they could reach around and unzip my backpack. They wouldn’t take anything from me, but their curiosity and collaboration are stunning.

Yossenia Howls

Yossenia, whom we guess is a little above two years old, arrived at La Finca with a large stomach and adult appetite. The caretakers think she has parasites and have put her on antibiotics. When she cries, she howls and won’t let anyone touch her. Above, the other kids try to calm her down while amusing themselves with her cute mannerisms.

The Heights Game

The kids creatively vie for attention sometimes by standing two feet off the ground and yelling “Seeeeeeee-meeeeeeee” with their arms outstretched to entice me to rescue them.

Daisy & Indira

Older kids take care of younger ones all the time, whether they’ve been assigned a care-taking chore or just want to play. Above, Indira carries Daisy over to a Christmas tree to show her the hanging ornaments.

Machine Gun Patrol

If you leave downtown Valle de Angeles in a southernly direction (no street names around here), walk a mile through pastures past the cemetery and church, maybe take a left, cross a river, and climb a hill, you will find yourself in the neighborhood of Carmelo. Above, soldiers in uniform with machine guns patrol the neighborhood. They are also always present while trucks unload goods in the valley, even if the protected cargoes are Doritos.

Home Design in Carmelo

Almost all homes in Carmelo were constructed in the same manner after a forest was leveled and a lottery created to select new homeowners. The pastors of the local church and their families live on our block. Notice the uninhabited grey home on the right. The houses in Carmelo start out unfinished and are personalized by the homeowner with pastel paint jobs, colorful tiles, porch columns, ornate iron gratings over the windows, etc. Only the tin roofs and the size appear to be similar in the end.

Carmelo Home

Barbed wire surrounds the richer families’ homes, but most homes in Carmelo use towers for their primary source of water. For drinking and brushing teeth, however, we use bottled water. Thankfully, the new service on the block is a trash container at the bottom of the hill to enclose the trash. Dogs are everywhere, and you can hear them throughout the night. They compete with the megaphone-toting vegetable vendor for waking me up in the morning. Surprisingly, the neighbor’s rooster has his times mixed up and crows at night instead.

Jacky, Me, Kelly, and Lillian at the Airport

To gain the stamp of what was missing the previous day (see 6:30PM from yesterday’s post), we set out for Tegucigalpa the next morning with Jamie and her friends Lillian, Kelly, and Jacky. At the airport, after a customs official was profuse in his deflection of blame, the matter was cleared up. The official, who only spoke Spanish, seemed to know everyone in the airport and called “olaolaola” every time we passed one of his friends. At one point, we had to stop for a five-minute conversation with an American who just landed and had brought a “special DVD” for the official and his friend with Delta airlines who was securing the deal.

Tegucigalpa's Main Drag

Tegucigalpa has no discernible city center from what I could tell. A lack of urban planning, zoning, and utilities has generated kaleidoscope style sprawl with a water tower business across from the airport adjacent to a family restaurant which is a stone’s throw from a block of residences, etc.  Two-lane boulevards connect the city’s various districts. The visual result closely resembles an overgrown Long Island with lots of dirt.

Tegucigalpa's Amorphous Downtown

The city’s infrastructure is peculiar with little evidence of any piping or other utilities run underground. Wires haphazardly run everywhere. Note the spools of wire tied off at the telephone poles.

The role of American fast food in Honduras is similar to what I observed in China. American chains are treated as fancy sit-down style restaurants with somewhat jacked up prices. It was a treat for Jamie’s friends to eat at Pizza Hut, and though the atmosphere and music was from “American culture,” you could tell you were in Honduras when the waitress counted out exactly the same number of napkins as there were people.

Tegucigalpa Taxi Rides

It costs about 100 Lempiras (5 USD) to take a taxi from the airport to our bus stop in Tegucigalpa. The first driver quoted 125 Lempiras, so we declined. When the second one said cien (100), we agreed. They knew that the driver would not overcharge because he was blasting a Christian radio station.

The first thing to note about the taxis is that they have no meters – you fix the price before you get in. Second, there are no operable seat belts except perhaps for the driver’s seat. Third, there will always be something dysfunctional with the doors or windows. In the taxi pictured above, a smashed windshield was covered up with tape. Moreover, there was no window glass in the passenger window, which was of particular concern since rolling up all windows at intersections is the most convenient way to not be accosted by persistent vendors.

Back to the Valley

Before leaving the city, we shopped for real butter, peanut butter, chicken breast, cereal and other gustatory luxuries in an western-style grocery store that did not stock too differently from a store in American except that milk was sold in bags and there were less options overall. After taking the bus back to Valle de Angeles, we walked with our groceries through the hills to get home.

El Salvadorean Coast Sighted from Turboprop

Since events became increasingly more peculiar and fantastic as the day of my voyage to Honduras progressed, I can’t help but give a detailed account in the time domain. If you want the quick sensational version, skip to 3:30PM or 6:30PM.

06:00AM EST – Departed snow-covered Pleasantville NY for the airport.

07:30AM EST – Snuck into the first class security line and felt a tad triumphant until I saw that the line took just as long since everyone in first class ended up being part of a senior citizen travel club carrying lots and lots of meds and with no idea as to what you’re allowed to take on an airplane.

08:30AM EST – Terminal 4 of JFK was packed with Spanish-speaking travelers. My cultural immersion had already commenced.

09:30AM EST – Departed JFK, NY for San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. Since I flew with TACA airlines, everything was spoken and written in Spanish. I soon realized that I looked Latina to the flight crew and had to explain repeatedly, no entiendo (I don’t understand) or no hablo espagnol (I don’t speak Spanish) or just jugo (juice) to make things simple.

01:30PM CST – Volcanoes, tropical forests, and cows were all in sight as we land in San Salvador. The airport is by far the most interesting I have ever explored, abundant with local food and cultural trinkets. Communication was repeatedly a problem, but I managed to get by with hand motions. I nearly missed my plane on account of a dulce de leche candy purchase with way more dulce de leche in the bag than I thought I asked for.

02:30PM CST – Departed San Salvador for San Pedro Sula, Honduras near the Guatemalan border. I realized that choosing the cheapest ticket available with the disincentive of 3 flights in one day was not a bad idea after all – I felt like I was getting a personal tour of Central America by turboprop. We flew at a low altitude over mountainous regions with the occasional small village burrowed in the hillsides.

03:30PM CST – Landed in San Pedro Sula. Our flight to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras was delayed, so I connected to the free DigiCel Wi-Fi network. A quick search informed me that San Pedro Sula recently replaced Ciudad Juarez, Mexico as THE MOST VIOLENT CITY in the western hemisphere by homicide count. I sat in the corner by the vending machines eating my dulce de leche candy and minding my own business, when I heard a man yell behind me followed by several other shouts. I turned around just in time … to catch the replay of a soccer goal being scored on the TV monitor in the waiting room.

05:30PM CST – We finally left San Pedro Sula for Tegucigalpa. Everyone was hooked on Blackberry’s and simultaneously able to keep up an impressive level of chatter. I couldn’t tell if the passengers all knew each other, or they were just friendly to strangers while traveling.

06:30PM CST – Our plane landed in Tegucigalpa and the more gregarious of the travelers clapped, cheered, and raised their arms as if another soccer goal had been scored. I heard from Jamie later that Tegucigalpa is the third most dangerous airport to fly into because if the plane does not stop within the span of the runway, it will crash into the base of a mountain…?

06:35PM CST – I stepped off the plane, walked through the airport of Tegucigalpa, grabbed my bags, and met Jamie and her friend Lilliana. One person checked my baggage ticket without taking it, and another asked where I came from, to which I replied San Pedro Sula. I was then free to enter Honduras… (will explain the whole story more later, including what’s missing from this situation and why)

6:45PM CST – The Tegucigalpa taxi drivers prefer not to drive out of town in the dark, but we were lucky enough to convince one to take us to Valle de Angeles, a 45-minute ride from the airport. It was a wild ride – no seat belts, no blinkers, no posted speed limits.

7:30PM CST – We arrived in the downtown of Valle de Angeles and carried my luggage on rocky dirt roads for about a mile until we reached Jamie’s home. I could just barely make out the faint outline of mountains in the distance. Dogs barked at us as we hiked by. Unique houses were built out of the hillsides in a scattered layout.

8:30PM CST – We reached Jamie’s quaint home and rested for the night. Below is a picture I took of Jamie’s block the next day.

Our Neighborhood in Valle de Angeles