30 August 2007
On the way home.
The trip to Honduras with five other fellow Rotarians was a huge success. We delivered a whole bunch of wheelchairs to people who needed them but couldn’t afford them, got to know one another much better and made some new friends among the Honduran Rotarians that we worked with each day. An added pleasure was found in the fact that none of our group succumbed to Montezuma’s famous malady designed for invaders from the north.
Our midnight flight from San Francisco, via BART, was uneventful if not tiresome. We were a bedraggled looking bunch that was met by Rotarians from San Pedro Sulla (Valley) Sunday morning. Our five hour flight had a stop at San Salvador, El Salvador with a short layover before boarding for the final one hour leg of our trip South. We traveled with TACA Airlines, a new experience for all of us defining our limited experience in traveling in Central America. TACA is really big in this part of the world and a very nice carrier. I was impressed with the cabin stewards, three men and one petite lady, the free booze and meals and the quality of service.
A first stop in San Pedro Sulla was for lunch at a popular eating place that specialized in barbecued meat dishes served in an interesting stilted wallless building next door to an auto wash. Our meal was served family style from small braziers that were set on our table. Each brazier contained several kinds of barbecued meat. Side dishes of vegetables and baked yucca completed the meal. Everything was delicious and promised enjoyable eating during our stay in Honduras.
Luncheon discussions identified San Pedro Sulla as the industrial capital of Honduras. Located an hour from the country’s major Caribbean seaport, the area is rapidly expanding with new industries opening each year. San Pedro Sulla is the second largest city in Honduras with the Capital, Tegucagalpa, the largest.
We were then taken to a hotel owned by one of the local Rotarians where we enjoyed four star accommodations and service for
$50.00 a day; the normal price. We immediately crashed with a scheduled planned dinner allowing us a few hour for a nap on a bed. The planned dinner never happened and our group ate together at the hotel’s poolside restaurant. Our discussions entertained the notion that perhaps are whole visit may end up with unfulfilled schedules leaving us promised to be flexible but a little dubious about the success of our visit.
Our first day on the job demonstrated that we had nothing to worry about as the “first string” took over with the actions planned for our stay. We began the morning with a wheelchair distribution outside of a building that we would call a welfare office. When we arrived on the scene, we found what appeared to be a couple of hundred people quietly waiting for the party to begin. A mountain of wheelchairs in boxes were stacked against the building. A table was set up where several people worked with lists of names of selected recipients and their previously completed applications. We were told that a process had been followed through which an announcement of wheelchair availability and application procedures was followed by a physicians report that a wheelchair was a recommended use for a particular patient. Once selected, recipients were told where they needed to be to receive a wheelchair.
Our morning’s activity consisted of unboxing the wheelchairs, making last minute set up of the chairs with some adjustments to fit patients, and the presentation of the wheelchairs. Often we found ourselves lifting people from the ground or out of the arms of family into the new chairs. Some patients arrived in old wheelchairs badly in need of repair or replacement of parts. The trade-ins became a project for another Rotary club that refurbished the chairs and made them available to others in need. We saw many broad smiles on the faces of the new wheelchair owners along with a lot of tears. One young man who lost both of his legs when he attempted to hot a freight train headed for the U.S. border immediately set about learning to do wheelies to entertain the crowd.
We repeated the presentation of chairs several more times during the next two days. One shipment took us to a home for old folks who had to be carried from their beds to the dining room or to chairs in the patio by staffers. The huge toothless smiles of wrinkled up arbuelos was an experience none of us will forget. Another shipment went to an orphanage were some bright little kids were in need of mobility. Yet another presentation was made by our group to a home for severely disabled children where it seemed that none of the youngsters were able to walk by themselves. The 78 children at this facility, operated by the Hermanas de Jesus was totally devastating to those in our group who had never been close to such children before. We decided that the sisters working there were surely “Sisters of Jesus”.
The local Rotarians were eager to show us some of their projects in San Pedro Sulla. We were taken to a home for boys from the street where yet another Catholic order of nuns cared for about forty kids who had been picked up on the streets by the police and put in the care of the nuns. The facility was right in the middle of one of the nicer residential area. While we were there, a volunteer neighbor came by for his daily coaching of the home’s soccer team. The young men we saw were all good looking and very polite. We were assured, however, that each had a sordid past that he was trying to live through.
We traveled outside of town to see a new school that the Rotarians were working on in cooperation with the state and the Catholic Church. The State built the building, the church supplied the teachers and the club provided the furnishings and the teaching materials. The five hundred children to be served by the school had formerly attended classes in a forty by fifty wall less, dirt floored building set in the middle of an adjacent village. The village was home to families who made their living by scavenging the nearby city dump for things they could eat or sell. Water was hauled to the village daily in a rusty tanker truck by the state. Fewer than half of the homes had electricity and those that did typically had a single bare light bulb illuminating the home. The houses were simple affairs constructed of whatever could be scavenged at the dump and covered by a rusty piece of metal.
The nicer parts of San Pedro Sulla featured razor wire atop the usual walled properties. Neighborhoods hired armed patrolmen to protect their houses from thieves that are a constant threat. We saw very little graffiti that we have learned to expect. Crime however is everyone’s concern.
We visited the business of one of the Rotarians where paper cups are made. The young owner started the business from scratch after attending an MBA program sponsored by the Organization of American States. He was taught how to write a business plan that would satisfy a venture capitalist and away he went. In nine years he has built a business that employs 250 workers and supplies paper cups to fast food chains throughout Central America, the Caribbean and the United States. Wendy’s, MacDonalds, Coca Cola and a lot of other big names are now his clients. We toured the factory and came away with the knowledge that this man had learned some valuable skills with his MBA.
Honduras is working very hard to pull itself up by the proverbial bootstraps. The country has developed a concept like Bill Clinton’s Business Zone. Honduras calls their idea a Duty Free Zone. Once such as zone is established and approved, the manufacturers are allowed to operate without any federal taxes, without local property taxes, without any taxes on their profits, without import or export duties, and more. We visited one of these zones and saw 30 businesses that employed several thousand workers manufacturing all kind of things. One business that we toured was making a number of electrical devices that were for Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other such US retailers. These “Free Zones” provided common services for those businesses that wished to become involved. Initial employment interviews, medical services, common bookkeeping, group insurance packages, shipping and many other things were available to businesses located in the zone.
We learned that Honduras has some interesting federal laws relating to workers that we found unique. All regular workers are paid fourteen monthly salaries each year; One extra month on June 30 and another extra month’s salary on January 1. Workers fired or released without cause are entitled to one month’s severance pay for each year employed by the company up to fifteen years. The government has also set a minimum wage, about a dollar an hour, and an earned vacation mandate that builds to twenty days a year after five years. With all of its efforts, Honduras has been successful in attracting considerable outside capital and created many new jobs. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is still at about forty-five percent.
The weather we experienced was pleasant if not hot and muggy. Our work with the wheelchairs left all of our group pretty sweaty and smelly. We were all pleased at the end of each day to be able to use the pool at our hotel in the afternoon before dinner.
On our final day, prior to our afternoon flight, we were taken to the Caribbean coast, about an hour’s drive from San Pedro Sulla. The highway we used was well paved with two lanes in each direction and very little traffic. The “beach”, where most of the well to do residents of San Pedro Sulla have beach homes, had a wonderful breeze and white sandy beaches with a “warm enough for a bath ‘ ocean to swim in. We had a nice lunch at a beach resort that is packed on weekends. On our visit we had the place to ourselves.
I was pleased and privileged to be a part of my Rotary club’s effort to help those who need a wheelchair to have any sense of normalcy in their lives. Our club is approaching the 3000 wheelchair donation level and I’m sure we’ll continue our efforts under the auspices of the wheelchair foundation. With a little luck and good fortune, I hope to make many similar trips in the future.

Hi Everyone,

Our Rotary group, nine strong, will be leaving San Francisco Sunday morning at 1:30 AM and arriving at San Pedro Sula, via San Salvador, at about 10:00 AM. Our return flight on Thursday next will arrive in San Francisco at about midnight. A group of Rotarians will meet us to ferry us home.

In San Pedro Sula, we will be staying at the La Cordillera Hotel for four nights; tele 504-556-6116.

I'm really looking forward to the trip. It looks like my life long ability to sleep in airplanes is going to come in handy.

My trip to Colorado was uneventful but worthwhile. It was nice meeting Leigh's wife, Margie Crandell, again and being a small part of the funeral ceremony. After Leigh's three kids each made a tearful statement, I loosened the crowd up, about eighty people, with some remembrances of times we shared as teenagers. I got several sustained laughs from the group in the process. At least they didn't cry. I flew out of Oakland on a six o'clock flight that had me in a rental car about 11:00 PM. I drove for an hour and crashed in a Best Western in Castle Rock. I woke up at my usual 5:30, showered, had a great hotel breakfast that came with the room, and drove to Canon City, arriving a couple of hours early for the funeral. After the funeral I drove back to Denver and caught a 6:00 o'clock non-stop flight back to Oakland arriving before the sun went down. Needless to say, I didn't wake up at 5:30 Wednesday morning.

The new Ford truck runs like a new truck. I'm pleased. I will get the camper mounted on September 3 making me almost ready for my Winchester Bay crabbing adventure beginning 9/14.


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