La Gata Alunada and other tales from Honduras

I wish we could in good faith say it was strange to have received advice from our 9-year-old neighbor about how to deal with our 8-month-old cat that’s going into heat, but, alas, that’s not the world we live in. Here, acquiring knowledge about the procreation habits of animals accompanies, if not precedes learning the ABCs, not by design but rather by circumstance. We know of no one in our immediate neighborhood that has their pets spade or neutered. Why? It's expensive, for one. The nearest vet who can do the job is a 2 and a half hour bus trip away, plus taxi fare, all stacked atop costs of the operation itself. Additionally, most domestic animals here have two shifts to fulfill: during the waking hours they’re expected to be friendly to their owners, playmates to children and otherwise stoic fixtures of the streetscape, grudgingly moving for and subsequently staring down all passersby (which I would argue is perhaps the most important of their roles), while at night, cats pursue and eat all varieties of critter (ours eats cockroaches, others eat mice, you get the point) and dogs are employed as guardians. I feel these animals' supreme functionality contributes to their being viewed not so much as pets to be cared for but as animals to, well, be animals.

Enough sidestepping the issue, though; we, as the caretakers, or parents if you will, of Luz, an 8-month-old tabby, are facing the tough news that she is capable of having kittens, heralded to us not only by the confidently delivered lectures of a young girl but also by the nearly incessant screeching of a fluffy white male cat. As could be inferred by what I stated earlier, this situation wouldn’t present much of a problem to most anyone who lives near us. If Luz were under the stead of our neighbors she would likely become pregnant, give birth, and become another in the slew of unruly animals in our neighborhood who periodically disturb the peace with their wild, lascivious behavior. On one side of our home we are bordered by a humble yellow church, whose lot is occupied a few days a month by several dogs from the neighborhood that are, you guessed it, engaging in illicit acts. Incidentally, this very morning I was privy to such a scene when I stepped outside to collect water from our pila, barely awake and still cleaning from my eyes the remnants of my sleep. We have a different vision for our cat, though. Right, wrong, or somewhere in the gray, she will be getting spade as soon as possible. That, however, will be another day’s tale.

Aside from looking after our cat, there are a few other ways in which we occupy our time these days. To proceed in chronological order, on September 21st the exiled president made a surprise return to Honduras, from which time he has successfully sought refuge within the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. Since his return, he and the interim/de facto government have taken part in an intense series of negotiations aimed at returning some semblance of normalcy and direction to the country’s political future. To date, there have been advances in the negotiations, but nothing that presents a definitive solution to the problem. Owing to the continued political uncertainty, coupled with the fact that Honduras is supposed to be hosting it's national elections at the end of November, the interim/de facto government declared that the school year (already terribly truncated by the political instability and concerns about the spread of the H1N1 flu virus) would end in mid October rather than late November to ensure that the voting stations – most, if not all of which, are schools – would be secure to host the vote. We were lucky to have previously planned to end our two existing projects by mid October. Several of our friends, however, were in the midst of school related projects at the time of the declaration and have needed to postpone or cancel their projects. It's fair to say that no one in the country has been unscathed by the coup, and volunteers are no exception. So, on to what we’re hoping to do in the near future. Since the school year has been prematurely terminated, and many of the kids who live near us are in want of productive ways to use their time, we’re hoping to start a reading club along with a library project so as to create an interest in leisure reading amongst children who have had very limited exposure to books, particularly outside of school.

All of that said, for the next month our attention will be increasingly focused on how the country prepares itself for its upcoming national elections. I think we, like most everyone, are hoping that somehow in the course of the next month Honduras will successfully prepare for and host its elections, ultimately resulting in a clearer path by which it can begin to heal itself as the new president assumes power in January.