In Honduras today, I saw a man riding his horse down the street, talking on his cell phone, and I found myself wondering: is that legal? In Washington, we have laws about talking on the phone while in transit. Either you have a hands-free device, or you leave the talking to your co-pilot. The horseman clearly had no hands-free device. Copilot? Thankfully, his scrawny beast was only burdened with one human. But do you think anything in Washington’s legal code allows for...autopilot? The technology hasn’t arrived on US streets, but I would say the horse knew exactly where it was going, and was fully capable of averting obstacles without instructions from its master. Horse autopilot therefore poses very little risk of accident. There’s an idea to consider if you like to chat while commuting.
The juxtaposition of old and new economies is all over Copán: men drive gas-powered trucks out to the forest to cut firewood with hand tools. The wood fuels stoves in households where families do have electricity, but find it more useful to power their televisions. Local carpenters and tortilla-makers, who used to have a lock on the local market, are just now facing competition from industrial, manufactured versions of their products.
In this world of two economies, those who are first to join the new one reap the most benefits. Felipe, the owner and sole technician of the largest internet supplier in town, has 250 customers paying the equivalent of $40 per month for his service. By Honduran standards, he is bringing in a small fortune of $120,000 annually. I do not know what his overhead looks like, but his profit potential is certainly much greater than that of someone who hauls a dozen bundles of wood into town each day to be sold for 10 Lempiras (about $0.55) apiece.
Felipe did not receive a formal technical education. He was lucky to be able to spend a few months in the US (I’m not sure if he came legally or not, as visas are extremely difficult to acquire when coming from Honduras), and he was doubly lucky to have a relative in Miami who works with computer networks. With this brief experience, Felipe was able to launch his start-up a few years ago.
Not everyone in Honduras is as lucky as Felipe. The two paths to join the new economy of technology and international trade, connections to rich countries and education, both favor individuals from families that are already wealthy. Immigration to the US is a difficult, expensive process. Staying in school beyond sixth grade is tough when your family needs you to work, and schooling is only free until ninth grade. Upper-level education is focused around Honduras’s two big cities, San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, which are dangerous, expensive places to live.
While Honduras is benefiting from its integration into the new economy, the advantages are favoring some people more than others. To share the wealth more efficiently and evenly, Honduras needs to expand its educational system and provide incentives for young people to stay in school and learn the trades that will make them better contributors to society.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Where is the poverty?
Downtown Copán is beautiful. The town centers on a spacious plaza full of shady trees, with a stone fountain in the middle. Across the cobbled streets from the plaza are modern-looking hotels, restaurants, a bank with an ATM, and cafés with wi-fi. If you were to parachute into the plaza and start your exploration of Honduras from there, you might immediately think you had found a better version of the United States: all of the services you ever wanted, in a gorgeous setting, at a third of the price (Hotel Marina de Copán, the best 4-star in town, starts at $85 per night; a nice dinner for two costs around $10). And then you might ask yourself: where is the poverty?
I found myself wondering this upon my arrival in Copán. Of course, there are a few immediately noticeable lifestyle changes—you can’t drink the tap water, and you have to put your TP in the little can next to the toilet instead of flushing it—but these don’t necessarily make you feel like you are living in poverty. (Imagine Vancouver with smaller pipes and no water treatment.) All in all, these adaptations aren’t much compared to the poverty-shock I had imagined before leaving.
So there are some very nice things in Honduras. But some wealth does not equal general wealth. As a city that receives over 100,000 tourists per year (mostly to see the Mayan ruins just outside of town), downtown Copán comes with a bright shiny veneer that masks some of the problems its people are facing. If, instead of parachuting into the center of town, you had taken a more conventional approach—flown into San Pedro Sula and ridden the bus three hours into the hills—you would have seen a very different part of Honduran life.
Leaving San Pedro Sula (or, just San Pedro) is a little like leaving a war zone. Similar to other Central American cities, San Pedro has a ridiculously high crime rate—one of the clearest signs of poverty. One particular story comes to mind: I have a friend who lived in San Pedro for three years, during which he was robbed multiple times in different manners. The worst of these was a home break-in. Although his house was protected by a fence, plus bars on all of the windows, one tenacious criminal figured out how to get in. The crook pulled his truck up to the fence, allowing him to jump over and run a chain from his truck to the window bars. He then hit the accelerator and ripped the front off of my friend’s house.
The happiness you might feel escaping from Honduras’s second-largest city is tempered if you look through the window on your way out to see shantytowns stretching for miles. After you have realized that even a stone house with a fence and barred windows isn’t entirely safe, imagine living in a house cobbled together from thin sheets of roofing metal. On the bright side for most of the people who live in these houses, they can afford very little worth taking.
Between San Pedro and Copán is another kind of poverty. Rural Honduras is full of small agrarian villages, where people live much the same as they have for the past few centuries. Poor education and a dearth of job opportunities mean that people have little incentive to abandon their small farms in search of something more. Thus, while Copán has wi-fi, many Honduran families can’t afford necessary medical care; children continue to walk shoeless; and few stay in school past sixth grade, when they are brought back home to work and support the family.
If you ride the expensive luxury bus out of town, though, you can still miss everything: it picks you up at the airport and whisks you off to your destination in a compartment with curtains on the windows and a movie to distract you. Tourists from rich countries can travel and be pleasantly surprised by the affluence here. But poverty in Honduras is not defined by the upper end of the spectrum. Rather, the presence of a small class of people enjoying lifestyles similar to wealthy Americans makes it all the more shocking how poor the majority of Honduras is.
I found myself wondering this upon my arrival in Copán. Of course, there are a few immediately noticeable lifestyle changes—you can’t drink the tap water, and you have to put your TP in the little can next to the toilet instead of flushing it—but these don’t necessarily make you feel like you are living in poverty. (Imagine Vancouver with smaller pipes and no water treatment.) All in all, these adaptations aren’t much compared to the poverty-shock I had imagined before leaving.
So there are some very nice things in Honduras. But some wealth does not equal general wealth. As a city that receives over 100,000 tourists per year (mostly to see the Mayan ruins just outside of town), downtown Copán comes with a bright shiny veneer that masks some of the problems its people are facing. If, instead of parachuting into the center of town, you had taken a more conventional approach—flown into San Pedro Sula and ridden the bus three hours into the hills—you would have seen a very different part of Honduran life.
Leaving San Pedro Sula (or, just San Pedro) is a little like leaving a war zone. Similar to other Central American cities, San Pedro has a ridiculously high crime rate—one of the clearest signs of poverty. One particular story comes to mind: I have a friend who lived in San Pedro for three years, during which he was robbed multiple times in different manners. The worst of these was a home break-in. Although his house was protected by a fence, plus bars on all of the windows, one tenacious criminal figured out how to get in. The crook pulled his truck up to the fence, allowing him to jump over and run a chain from his truck to the window bars. He then hit the accelerator and ripped the front off of my friend’s house.
The happiness you might feel escaping from Honduras’s second-largest city is tempered if you look through the window on your way out to see shantytowns stretching for miles. After you have realized that even a stone house with a fence and barred windows isn’t entirely safe, imagine living in a house cobbled together from thin sheets of roofing metal. On the bright side for most of the people who live in these houses, they can afford very little worth taking.
Between San Pedro and Copán is another kind of poverty. Rural Honduras is full of small agrarian villages, where people live much the same as they have for the past few centuries. Poor education and a dearth of job opportunities mean that people have little incentive to abandon their small farms in search of something more. Thus, while Copán has wi-fi, many Honduran families can’t afford necessary medical care; children continue to walk shoeless; and few stay in school past sixth grade, when they are brought back home to work and support the family.
If you ride the expensive luxury bus out of town, though, you can still miss everything: it picks you up at the airport and whisks you off to your destination in a compartment with curtains on the windows and a movie to distract you. Tourists from rich countries can travel and be pleasantly surprised by the affluence here. But poverty in Honduras is not defined by the upper end of the spectrum. Rather, the presence of a small class of people enjoying lifestyles similar to wealthy Americans makes it all the more shocking how poor the majority of Honduras is.
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