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.