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.

In about an hour I’m heading to the airport.  While this certainly marks a turning point in our lives, it also marks a turning point in this web page.  Gone are posts like the last one about raging rivers, malaria and installation of running water (at least I hope those aren’t part of our experience in Chicago).  Quite frankly this web page will be getting pretty boring pretty quickly.  So consider this your fair warning and feel free to click unsubscribe if you’re on the e-mail version, we won’t be offended.  I make no excuses for the forthcoming posts about my lawn, the softball team I’m itching to join and the Bears chances at the Super Bowl.  

Worry not, we’ll still strive to keep it pretty updated because though we will be in Chicago we will still be far away from many of our family and friends.  Actually now that I think of it the posts may not be so boring after all.  While I’m accustomed to rampant corruption, tropical diseases and always carrying my passport, I’ve never mowed a lawn, shoveled snow or taken by kids to ballet class.  I think the second set might cause me more difficulty than living in the third world ever did.  

So, stay tuned for adventures from suburbia.

At the Finca I got a bit of nostalgic for rainy season.  If you’re a normal person rainy season isn’t particularly fun.  You’re wet all the time, clothes never dry hanging on the line, mud and mold become a normal part of your life.  But as a Finca volunteer it’s also a time of relief from the hot sun, you get to make daring rescues of trucks stuck in mud, electicity goes out and prompts candle lit dinners, water systems break prompting bucket showers, rivers rise and you see t he true power of nature and feel it’s effects in ways that just aren’t possible for most of us city dwellers.  So while I didn’t like getting soaking wet walking back from getting a beer with the vols, I certainly appreciated the chance to remember those times at the Finca with fond memories.  

As I took the bus back to Tegucigalpa on Monday I began to see the picture with a broader lens.  As we continued on I noticed more and more fields flooded, more rivers raging and more landlides being cleared from the highway.  I picked up a newspaper and began to read of the effects of 10 d ays of rain across the country.  knew that when I got to the office on Tuesday that likely we would be responding to an emergency.

So what happened?  Essentially we had about two weeks straight of rain which caused widespread damage across the country.  It just got to the point where the ground was so saturated that there was nowhere for the water to go and mudslides and flash floods were the result.  About 75% of the roads were damaged to some extent with 72 bridges or river crossings destroyed and another 169 damaged.  34 people were killed mostly when rivers rose and destroyed their homes (2,200 homes destroyed and double that many damaged. Thousands fled their homes for shelters and 250,000 acres of crops were destroyed.

COPECO (the government agency responsible for emergencies) coordinated both the national and international response and at least from my point of few had a decent handle on the situation.  As I had suspected I was busy at work on CRS’s response to the emergency.  We work entirely through local partners and in emergencies the partner with whom we work the most are the local Catholic dioceses.  My role during  the emergency was to take all the information funneled to me and turn it into money.  The dioceses would communicate with us and give us an assessment of the situation an our team here in the office would evaluate where, what and how much we needed to get into the field.  Within the first 24 hours we got out a situation report to our headquarters and another 6 hours after that we were working on drafts of the emergency proposals.  In all I wrote three proposals for things like blankets, mattresses, water, cooking kits, hygeine kits and medicine.  We were able to get the proposals approved pretty quickly and get the materials needed into the hands of the dioceses so they could respond to those in need.  

So worry not, I certainly wasn’t slogging through rain choked streets (the photos here are from the newspaper).  And while I spent most of the time in the office writing it was certainly an interesting experience.  We’re just hoping for no more rain any time soon.

Family and Friends,

We really thought that our lives would start settling into a more predictable pattern, but indeed that has not been the case.  Our time here in Honduras has been interesting and exciting to say the least and we are writing to say that it is nearing its end.   We write to share this with you because you are family and we wanted you to know that we are back in the states.

The past two weeks have been a flurry of emotions as we found out that we were pregnant and then yesterday found out that Erika had had a miscarriage.  The miscarriage is the immediate cause that is bringing us home, but there are so many other factors including the security situation here, the frequenc with which I travel and the path that this lifestyle has set out before us.  In the end we decided that this lifestyle is not for us and we’re now in the process of moving towards our next step. 

The miscarriage has sped up that timeline somewhat.  While the medical care we have received in Honduras thus far has been of high quality, after consulting with midwives and doctors both here and in the states we have decided it would be better for Erika to head back to the US.  Erika is healthy and coping well (both mentally and physically).  It is simply out of an abundance of precaution that she is returning so soon.  It also made sense that if we were thinking a change was in order that now might be an opportune time.

We are all returning to South Bend tomorrow (Sept 25).  Erika and the kids will stay in South Bend while I return to Honduras Oct 2 to finish up work on November 1st.  Our trajectory from there will likely take us to Chicago where we’ll settle more permanently.  There is so much that went into this decision and it’s so hard to put in an email.  In the end we just wanted to share this with you so that when you ran into us at a Notre Dame football game it wouldn’t be a surprise.  While we are sad to be leaving Honduras and what in my case was a really great successful job we are also excited to be moving closer to our family and friends in Chicago more permanently.

We have lots of transitions ahead and the next few months will be a bit crazy even by our standards.  We hope you will keep us in your prayers both from a distance and in person and we hope to see many of you soon.  

Love,

Michael-John and Erika

When we learned that we were pregnant we had just about decided that we were done having children.  We had three beautiful children, we were happy, we were good with three.  The amazing gift of our fourth child is that he or she opened up space in my heart that I didn’t know existed.  The striking thing about a miscarriage is that it so often happens just as you were getting used to the idea of being pregnant, of being a parent.  We had started to think of ourselves as a family of 6, making plans for our four children.  In the two weeks we were pregnant suddenly there was this space for this child whom I loved, whose father I was and who I wanted so very much to meet.      

And now there is an emptiness, a sadness that is there because I will never have that chance.  Every time I think about it I think of this quote I misremembered from a class Erika and I took in college.  All I can think of is that the empty space is somewhere new and exciting in my heart that in time will be filled with joy.  I don’t know how that space will be filled but I do know that it is a gift from a child who I will never know but love so very much.  

Note:  The quote at the beginning of the post is from Leon Bloy.  As I said, I misrembered the quote substituting sadness where Bloy writes suffering which more accurately described how I felt.  The actual quote reads “There are places in the heart that do not yet exist, and it is into these that suffering enters, that they may have existence.”

I’ve quickly become accustomed to driving on the main boulevards of Teguz with the taxis, buses, and sad street performers (let’s just say it’s not Barcelona).  Any big city I’ve ever lived it has its vendors selling their wares: newspapers, cell phone cases, socks on the 55th street overpass at the Dan Ryan and pies from the Nation of Islam on Stoney Island in Chicago.  Teguz is no different, though belts seem to be the most common item here.  The other night driving home there I was startled to see people selling (you guessed it): Puppies. 

Now I’m no marketing guru but stoplights and street corners seem to be an impulse buy sort of market.  You’re looking for something the consumer can decide on, pull out the money for and complete the transaction before the light turns green.  Sort of the like the checkout line at the supermarket or a wedding chapel in Vegas.  Regardless, there must be those willing to pull over to buy that puppy they’ve just got to have or to throw some money out the window and grab Spot (or in this case Espot) by the scruff of the neck and hit the gas before the guy behind them starts honking. 

I truly wish I had a camera to capture these guys standing there in traffic holding three or four puppies our to potential buyers as they dodged motorcyles.  Fortunately for you (and surpisingly to me) this is a common sight in the developing world and a quick internet search turned up a photo from Africa that is pretty close to what it looked like that afternoon in Teguz.  Enjoy.

All of that changed last week as the town held a grand celebration to open the spigots for the first time.  With dancing and speeches (lots and lots of speeches) we celebrated a project that is bringing running water to twelve villages for the first time.  A Bi-national project between Honduras and El Salvador (we were about 20 miles from the Salvador border) built the main distribution line to bring water 12 miles from the river to a main distribution point.  From there CRS and our partner Caritas then built the local water distribution system in San Juan. 

Two more villages are on tap for CRS next year and other NGOs have built or are building distribution systems for the remaining villages.  It’s startling to think what a difference it would be to wake up one morning and have running water for the first time in your life. 

Click here for pictures from the trip.  Also up are videos of the traditional dance the school children did and video of what it’s like to ride in a Toyota Hi-Lux in the back roads of Honduras.  

After my last post about resorting to Burger King for my children’s amusement I thought I would just post an update that we found something much better than a BK playland.  It turns out that Tegucigalpa has a world class children’s museum.  We’re talking 4 floors of pure educational fun.  Costumes, kid sized construction vehicles, a giant nose that sneezes on you and a life sized game of Operation to name just a few. 

We spent the day there this afternoon and had a great time.  Really an awesome surprise and someplace we’ll be going back to many times I’m sure.