Weighing the Risks and Rewards of Helping Honduras

The gang members helped build the house. We get to know these kids as people. A lot of them are very sweet kids who have just had a very tough life.

By Joan Chrissos
Virtually the entire American Airlines flight going to San Pedro Sula in Honduras was clad in color-coordinated t-shirts, each representing a group doing good in the Central American country. Medical missionaries from South Carolina. College students from the Northeast. Church groups of kids, parents and pastors from across the country, including ours from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Coral Gables.

In the six summers I’ve traveled with my family to San Pedro Sula to volunteer at Nuestras Pequeñas Rosas (Our Little Roses), a home and school for abused, orphaned and abandoned Honduran girls, there has never been an empty seat on the planes. A handful of the passengers are Hondurans, the rest are Americans who are building homes and schools, running clinics, distributing food and bonding with the Honduran people.

Yet with Honduras’ per-capita murder rate topping the worldwide charts in 2010 -- coupled with the Peace Corps’ decision to leave the country in December after one of its volunteers was shot in the leg in an armed robbery in San Pedro Sula -- many are worried about the impact the violence will have on their work.

“Just yesterday a supporter of Honduras called me, worried that Honduras is becoming a place in crisis. They wanted to know how we are seeing the situation,’’ said Oscar Castañeda, vice president of the Americas program for Heifer International, the global nonprofit that has been working in Honduras for 40 years.

His take: The violence is primarily between gang members and drug cartels, who’ve moved in from Mexico. That said, Heifer avoids driving at night and holds meetings in villages, not cities.

As the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere -- after Haiti -- Honduras relies heavily on humanitarian groups. Volunteer medical professionals treat people who’ve never been to a doctor. Groups like Food For The Poor in Coconut Creek, Florida, build homes for families who’ve never lived in anything but a shack with a rusted metal roof. And in places like Nuestras Pequeñas Rosas, volunteers read, sing, bake cookies, make pizzas and build bonds with the girls over a lifetime, encouraging them in school and helping pay for their college educations -- in a country where two out of three people in 2010 lived below the poverty line.

Heifer goes to Honduras 12 to 15 times a year, bringing small groups of volunteers on each trip. In addition to doing community service projects, Heifer, whose largest Central American program is in Honduras, takes groups to organic coffee plantations and honey cooperatives to raise awareness about the global food chain.

“People realize that by paying 50 cents more for a cup of organic and fair-trade coffee, they are supporting the coffee growers in Honduras,’’ Castañeda said.

Heifer has no plans to pull out of Honduras; it has a group heading to Tegucigalpa, the capital, in February. Heifer, he noted, worked in Guatemala throughout its three-decade civil war, which ended in the mid-1990s. It also worked through the coup of 2009 when the military forced then-Honduran President Manuel Zelaya into exile at gunpoint.

“We haven’t shied away from places that have some levels of difficulties,’’ he said.

When the coup made headlines in June 2009, the impact was immediate.

“It was a Sunday morning and I was coming out of church when I got this phone call. It was from the group that I was about to pick up at the airport. They called to tell me they were canceling, that they were concerned about the State Department issuing a travel warning,’’ said Diana Frade, the Miami founder and executive director of Nuestras Pequeñas Roses.

For the next six months -- a period normally booked with back-to-back groups -- no one came.

“The girls were very, very sad,’’ said Frade, who founded the home in 1988. “The groups are their extended family. They spent half of the year without visitors.’’

Frade, the wife of the Rev. Leo Frade, the Episcopal bishop of Southeast Florida, theorized the Peace Corps left because of poor diplomatic relations stemming from the Zelaya coup.

Kristina Edmunson, a Peace Corps spokeswoman in Washington, said there were a number of issues that led the Peace Corps to pull its 158 volunteers, including “the safety and security of our volunteers on the ground.’’

She noted the Peace Corps had removed its volunteers from two other Central American countries during civil strife -- Nicaragua from 1979 to 1991 and El Salvador from 1980 to 1993 -- but it has since returned to both countries.

The humanitarian groups recognize the dangers and work closely with local partners.

Volunteers in Medical Missions, a South Carolina nonprofit that runs medical clinics in the rural parts of Honduras, works with a pastor at a local church in Olanchito. They also train a trusted member of the community to disperse medical supplies when they’re not there.

“We never have had any problems in Honduras,’’ said Larry Secrest, the group’s director, noting a team will go there in March.

“When our teams come in, we visit very isolated villages,’’ he said. “Our teams go there once a year, and it may be the only medical assistance they get in a year. I saw a lady with nine children who was pregnant with her 10th. She told me that she had never been to a doctor.’’

Most of the violence is not in the villages; it’s in certain areas of the cities.

Patsy Curry of Nashville, a board member of Our Little Roses who has been going to Honduras for nearly 20 years, went to Honduras in December. She and others were there about a week, delivering presents to the girls and attending their high school and college graduations. They took the girls to malls, to lunches, to graduation parties -- all in San Pedro Sula.

“When we took the girls to buy graduation gifts, we saw shopping malls overflowing with families enjoying their time together,’’ she said. “This was not a city of terrified people hunkered down behind their security walls.’’

When Food For The Poor took volunteers in April to distribute food, build homes and visit children living with AIDS, it worked closely with CEPUDO, a nonprofit based in San Pedro Sula.

“They really have their ears to the ground. They know the areas where we can go into, and the areas where we can’t,’’ said Angel Aloma, executive director of Food for the Poor.

In fact, CEPUDO built a home near the garbage dump in Ocotillo, an area outside of San Pedro Sula where some of the poorest Hondurans live and scavenge for food. It’s also where gang members live. The group built a home for one of the gang members’ grandmothers.

“The gang members helped build the house,’’ said Linda Coello, founder and president of CEPUDO. “We get to know these kids as people. A lot of them are very sweet kids who have just had a very tough life.’’

It will get a lot tougher, however, if the volunteer groups stop coming.

Diana Scheeler, a retired teacher from Illinois, took her first trip to Honduras in April with Food for the Poor, shortly before her 70th birthday. She helped build a home for a family of 11 that had been living in an earthen hut in the mountain region of Santa Barbara.

“Here were these poor people, living on the edge of a mountain with a million-dollar view,’’ she said. “But they needed the basics, food, shelter. It was such a moving experience.’’

The Peace Corps’ decision to leave, she said, was “heartwrenching.’’

“I thought about the people who were left there. Who is going to care for them?’’ (1/25/12) (photo courtesy Internet)

Note: This article was reprinted with permission. It was originally published by The Miami Herald.