Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Seguir Adelante - A lesson in empathy

Time for your random bit of Spanish: "seguir adelante" generally means "to go on", "to continue forward" etc. and is used in the spirit of gathering oneself to continue with a difficult task. As we sit here in the office of the NGO with whom we sometimes work trying to update our laptop’s antivirus program with a 6.6 kB/sec connection, seguir adelante takes on an entirely new meaning. Trying to download a relatively small file is scheduled to take, oh, roughly the rest of our service with the Peace Corps. And think, we were hoping to get home before dark to prepare a nice meal (when you live near the equator, darkness always sets in at 6:00, which seems abysmally early in August)!

Aside from computer problems, the breadth and duration of which we won’t bore you with here, there have continued to be a number of challenges and problems throughout the country owing to the coup that happened about a month and a half ago. Seguir adelante. To varying degrees, most people are trying to continue with their normal lives. For our part, we feel like it’s not really possible for the country to return to normal right now in any real sense because, well, the president who is officially recognized by almost every political entity around the world that has shared an opinion on the subject has effectively been barred reentry to the country unless he’s willing to be arrested and put on trial upon breaching the border. Indeed, it´s quite a conundrum. Although we have our opinions on what’s going on in the country right now, what has happened, and what’s likely to happen, we recognize this is not the forum for such ideas. For the time being we’ll just say life seems to have a sense of suspended motion right now. However, one still has to go grocery shopping, wash the clothes, cut the grass, bathe (a greater chore than you may realize), and life’s not without it’s small pleasures, like reading “Donde está Spot” to our five year old neighbor for the umpteenth time or chasing our cat, Luz, who has grown by leaps and bounds and insists on trying to flee from our yard and stalk everything in sight. Seguir adelante.

Admittedly, volunteers amongst our Peace Corps group are handling this period of uncertainty in different ways. Some volunteers have internet access in their homes while others read by candlelight for lack of electricity in their communities. For many who don’t have good access to any form of news media (typically those without electricity), it’s probably fair to say that life is relatively normal. When one lives in the countryside, life’s not quite as subject to the ebbs and flows that accompany life "connected." We’re neither connected in the modern tech sense, nor are we in the countryside. As far as we can tell, most people in our neighborhood are trying to live their normal lives while also paying attention when one of those familiar radio jingles sounds in their homes, signaling the start of another news bulletin. We’re ready to get back to work, but we’re also guarded about the success we expect due to the undercurrent of political preoccupation that has stalled and altered our work in these last 6 weeks. Seguir adelante.

¿As for empathy? We’ve been in Honduras for well over a year and while we claim no expertise on any aspect of the culture, we have experienced enough life here, in normal and abnormal days alike, to have some sense for how the average Honduran views and approaches their life. Conservative Christian faith and prayer are foundational and indispensable for nearly all. We’ve entered innumerable hypothetical conversations on various topics with Honduran friends and neighbors, all of us throwing out suppositions and theories, to ultimately say “Solo Dios sabe/only God knows.” We say it to. When you live someplace with as many unpredictable and unsettling occurrences as Honduras – between late May and late June Honduras has experienced the largest earthquake in recorded Central American history and suffered the first definitive coup to hit the region in decades, not to mention the devastating tropical storm that ushered us in to our service 10 months ago – well, at the very least one begins to realize they are not the undisputed author of their own destiny. Al revés, to flip the idea on its head, when volunteers go home to the States, even in these troubling economic times, they return to a more stable country, one where relative safety and relative political and financial stability are not necessarily unreasonable expectations. Some may even fondly think of home as a Candy Land of sorts, chock full of good pizza, ice cream, modern movie theaters, a plethora of good restaurants, and all of those other perks many miss during their service.

In spite of the comforts awaiting volunteers at home, we again ask ¿can we be empathetic? In the midst of our stresses and frustrations, and yes, joys as well, as volunteers here in Honduras do we learn to empathize with the Honduran people, those with whom we live and work? Well, to an extent. But there’s a catch, and here it is: while we get to go home, of course, Hondurans are already home. As new volunteer groups come and go, Honduras will continue in a mood it’s quite familiar with, patient resilience. It’s not joy but has the hint of a smile (or is it a grin?) and instructs that one should be happy when possible and patient when not. For volunteers who finish their service tomorrow and those who’ve yet to arrive, that patient resilience is something to be understood, and perhaps even put into practice for a time, but rarely does it become a mandatory way of life. Patient resilience pulled things back together last fall in the midst of and after the devastating tropical depression. Patient resilience will be the centerpiece as the country reassesses and reassembles itself when the current political crisis comes to an end. Patient resilience, by the way, will have nothing to do with the politics and innumerable platitudes we hear leading up to the presidential elections, scheduled to take place in November (will they be boycotted in protest?) It listens, and waits, always observes, and knows that things will be “all right” in their own time. Seguir adelante.