Last year, one of my favorite experiences of the whole year was spending a weekend with a Honduran family in a remote town in the mountains surrounding Cofradía, and I was so excited to be able to travel with them again. The adventure started on Friday afternoon, when five of us gringos and our two Honduran friends managed to squish ourselves and all our belongings into the paila of a truck with about fifteen other people all headed up the same mountain road. It was a slow trek, full of attempts to readjust our uncomfortable positions and apologize for falling on top of the people next to us when we went around a curve. The others periodically got off at their destinations until we finally had enough space to stand up and stretch out. As it got dark, I stood with my blanket wrapped around me, bracing myself against the ruts in the calle fea, enjoying the chilly breeze and the stars we can never see amongst all the lights of Cofradía. After about two hours, we reached the house where we would stay for the weekend, in the little pueblo of Santa Teresa, where everyone is related. Those who live there are constantly strolling down the street and popping into each other’s houses unannounced. We gringos were quite clearly an unusual sight, and I felt like a fish in a tank for the majority of the weekend. It wasn’t that the stares were negative; rather, they simply didn’t hide the fact that we were something novel to see. Exhausted after a week of school, we all crashed early that night on extremely thin mattresses on a concrete floor, doing our best to sleep through the unending rooster crowing and dog barking, early Christmas fireworks, and noisy motorcycles.
The next morning, the boys got up at 5:00 to get the full experience of what it’s like to work on a coffee farm. The rest of us decided to embrace the darkness of the concrete room and sleep much later than we ever sleep on weekends, taking our time to head over to the finca. The walk there was about 45 minutes of straight up hill, and we then had to navigate the steep incline of coffee plants on the side of the road. I sat in the dirt picking with one of the friends who came with us, a man in his late 20s, who shared with me some of his experiences of traveling to the States. He had spent several years working in Texas, during which he went through a challenging period of time that involved throwing away a lot of money on drinking. The police discovered he was there illegally when he got in a car accident and didn’t have papers. He spent seven or eight months encerrado before being deported. Back in Honduras, he was getting by with his savings and some jobs he found here, but he is again starting to feel the pressure of needing something more to support himself. He says it is difficult for him to find work here because his multiple tattoos, which have no negative significance, are often viewed as suspicious and suggest that he may be involved in a gang. He does not even feel safe entering certain colonias because he may be harmed based on these tattoos. Therefore, even though he already has two avisos from the police in the States and some trying journeys under his belt, he is considering returning. When we finished our short hour and half of coffee picking (a normal workday would be eight to ten hours on the farm), we sat on the side of the road eating the chicken and rice the family had delivered to us. The afternoon was spent taking a muddy walk to a beautiful river that was a bit too frío and strong for me to swim in.
After all of us falling asleep for a nap after dinner (with fireworks and a loud and passionate Evangelical service going on across the street), we had our energy to celebrate Raven’s birthday with cake, bachata, and campfire singing. The family eagerly put on their Romeo Santos CD with the volume of the stereo all the way up. However, we soon found out that none of them wanted to dance themselves but rather just watch us. We awkwardly showed off the little we have learned, and before we knew it, the mother was outside rounding up young Honduran primos from the street to come dance with us. Sitting outside by the fire proved to be a performance as well, with me going through my repertoire of one Spanish song, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, and Feliz Navidad.
We awoke the next morning to perhaps the most perfect day we’ve had this year. It felt just like fall in the States, comfy enough for a long sleeve shirt, not a cloud in the sky, and a cool breeze blowing. After breakfast, I headed up to the mirador behind the house to look out on the town. I probably could have stayed there for hours, mesmerized by the mountains, but some kids came up to throw their fireworks off the tower (yes, at 8 a.m.). In typical Honduran fashion, we were packed up and ready to go by 9, but we weren’t sure how we were getting home or how long it would take to wait for a passing car heading down to Cofradía. At one point, the friend we were traveling with said they had seen a San Pedro police truck patrolling through the town (a relaxing Sunday for them) and that we were going to ride with them. I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but no, en serio, the national police were going to pick us up on their way back through. So we spent the next few hours relaxing on the front porch and stopping by several houses on the road to say hello to even more relatives. By the end of our walk, we had acquired bananas, some type of plantains, and soda, held a one-month-old baby that had yet to be named, and heard another interesting and frustrating story of immigration. A family member asked us if we could look at several documents in English to figure out what was required of her husband to reapply for a visa. After perusing a transcription of his interview and a letter explaining his case, we discovered that he had initially been deported for overstaying a pleasure travel visa. Upon arriving a second time, he honestly told the interviewee that he had raked leaves four times for the brother he was staying with and that his brother had sent him a few hundred dollars when he went back home. Because this work did not comply with his intentions to only visit the US for “pleasure,” he was denied entrance. He is now allowed to reapply for a visa, but has to provide more documentation proving that he has ties (family, property, work) that will encourage him to return to Honduras. We left that interaction feeling angry and embarrassed to be representing our country. All weekend, we were treated with the utmost hospitality by so many Honduran family members that hardly knew us, sharing their homes, their food, and their company, and the only reputation they have in the States is one of dishonesty, crime, and inferiority.
Just after lunch, we piled into the back of the police truck, thinking that it was about to be one of the most hilarious experiences we had ever had. Quite obviously, we were stared at by everyone we passed on the way home, feeling a bit like celebrities and coming up with stories of why the police had arrested us. We stopped at two fútbol games, so the policemen could get out for a few minutes and look threatening, even though there were no problems. We also watched a man stopped next to his motorcycle get interrogated about why he was stopped, where was going, where his papers were, and what his tattoos meant. Besides those quick stops, it was a gorgeous ride through the mountain scenery, ending with one of the policemen taking our photo in the truck in the park of Cofradía. Definitely a solid way to end a refreshing weekend.
