Chuchos and Poverty Policy (a blog that i started a month ago and didn't finish)

Chuchos and Poverty Policy

Chuchos

Dozens of dogs roam the streets of Copán. By way of explanation, I have heard that Hondurans do not keep house-pets in the same way we do in the United States. A family may own and feed a cat or dog, but that animal lives exclusively outside the house. The idea appealed to me for awhile: pet ownership without confining an animal to life in a box; a best friend that can walk itself. Even more interesting was that everyone seemed to know the names of the town dogs. I remember thinking, “It makes sense—in a town where everyone knows each other, they also know each other’s dogs.” But as I paid more attention, I noticed a few stranger things. All of the dogs seemed to have the same name. “Chucho!” people would yell at passing dogs. Then, instead of coming, the dogs always seemed to turn tail and run from their callers. Had Honduran dogs re-discovered the call of the wild, and sought further independence from their human captors?

It wasn’t until I got fed up living with piles of garbage that I was finally able to answer this question. My landlady speaks wonderful Spanish. Her speed, fluency, and control of the regional accent are all enviable to someone who is trying to learn to communicate with locals. Put another way, she is impossible to understand. So when I have a question for her, like “What do I do with my garbage?”, I can generally expect an hour-long conversation full of gesturing and the words ripite por favor. What I think I learned, though, is that garbage day is Wednesday. Oh, and the garbage bags should be tied to the front gate, high up if possible, out of the reach of the chuchos. Because the chuchos are not fed by anyone in particular—they are stray dogs in a place where spaying and neutering has not yet arrived.

Poverty

To foil the chuchos, who might otherwise spread garbage all over Copán’s streets, houses and businesses without gates have constructed small garbage lofts. For example, my school, which produces five large bags of garbage every day—mostly food packages and scraps from the cafeteria—built a six-foot garbage loft structure on four poles with about 30 square feet of space on top. The bags pile up until garbage day, safe from chucho interference.

The other day, I found myself waiting for a friend in front of the school, not far from the garbage loft. I was there about ten minutes before a family of six showed up—five children under the age of ten, and their pregnant mother. The mother immediately sat down on a stone under a tree, holding the youngest child’s hand. I assumed they were waiting to catch a bus. Then I saw that the oldest of the family, a girl of nine, had climbed the tree and was picking fruit. The fruit is called jocote, and has no English translation of which I am aware. Jocotes are the size of large grapes, and my students like to buy them in bags of twenty before eating them with plenty of salt. They have not yet appealed to my taste buds.

In her mouth, the tree-climber held a machete. She climbed up high, and farther out on a limb than I would have dared to go. Then she began hacking away. As she chopped, I noticed her two younger brothers, probably five and seven years old, were climbing the garbage loft. They threw two bags down, jumped after them, and hauled them off into the bushes. The girl in the tree shouted at her youngest sister to step back a moment before her machete buried its blade in the ground next to her. Soon after, both sisters commenced stripping the branches of all of their small green fruit. The boys came out of the bushes with their trophy, two pizza boxes—I assume with some leftovers inside. The mother stood up, her children lined up behind her, and off they went from where they had come.

The whole event took less than ten minutes.