Myette.org

When we lived in Tegus last year I was at home alone with the kids and someone rang our doorbell.  I went down to answer the door and looking through the gate I could see it was three people with vests, official looking badges and clipboards.  It’s important to note here that when I say I went down to answer “the door” I mean the hefty reinfored gate in the middle of a 15 foot high wall topped with razor wire.  We lived in a big nice house in a very dangerous city and these precautions weren’t just for show.  You don’t just open the door for random visitors.

So I cautiously talked to the people with clipboards through the gate.  They said they were from the Honduran census bureau and were conducting a national census.  I hesitantly agreed to answer their questions, but after a few minutes the questions got too personal with questions like income and work details.  I started to feel uncomfortable so I ended the conversation, apologized and went upstairs into the house.  To this day I have no idea if they really were official census workers (for those of you who know Honduras you know how un-Honduran a census sounds). 

I thought of that experience this morning when I was listening to a report on NPR about the challenges of getting an accurate count in the U.S. census that is about to occur in 2010.  Minorities and immigrants are typcially undercounted while white males are sometimes counted twice or at least counted once accurately.  Homeless, fear of deportation, people living in motels and a general fear of authority are just a few of the variables that lead to the poor and minorities being undercounted.

It’s easy to dismiss this fear and can be difficult to relate to how someone might feel threatened by someone with a clipboard and an official census I.D.  But that day in Honduras I was scared.   I was operating in my second language, couldn’t tell if the badges were real or made at the local equivalent of Kinko’s and was worried they might be casing my house to rob it or worse.  As I listened to the NPR story I could easily put myself in the position of a mentally ill person in a homeless shelter or an immigrant (legal or illegal) from Guatemala who isn’t quite sure why this person is asking all these questions and fearful of their motivations.  

The troubling thing about the undercounting is that the poor, transient and vulnerable who are so difficult to count are also among those most hurt by undercounting.  The census helps planners determine public services from mental health to road and public transportation.  Addressing illegal immigration is a daunting task made more difficult by a lack of accurate data.  The census sounds so straightforward and simple but in practice it is so very difficult and at the same time so very important.  

The NPR report talked about a wide variety of efforts to encourage participation in the census, including the Spanish television station Telemundo working the census into the story lines of their telenovelas (Spanish soap operas).  So for the rest of my drive I daydreamed – imagining myself behind my gate in Tegus in a Honduran soap opera where I thought the census workers were spies for my sister’s lover’s uncle’s psychic who was trying to get more information so he could take over my hacienda through hynposis and superior population data sampling.  In the end though my cousin Betio convinces me that the census is important and I should participate so that city planners can better plan for the future of our ciudad.