Peace Corps Honduras: International Women’s Day, Prozac, Book Club, Cohen Testimony, Church Reform, Hormones & Behavior, Dreamland, Amnesty Int’l Staff Suicide, High-Tech Lynching?, Fake Attack, Honduras Mission

March 8, in case you missed it, was International Women’s Day.

At an interpretation assignment with an 11-year-old girl and her father, I learned she is now taking Prozac. I have seen her off and on since she was about 9. She seems to have improved dramatically on the Prozac, actually friendly to me when she was so withdrawn before. Psych drugs can have some amazing effects.

I joined a dozen others, mostly young people, at a meeting of a local Spanish-language book club, discussing a slender volume by a Colombian author. La Perra (The Dog, a Female Dog or Bitch). I had not actually read the book, having just come back from Honduras, but glanced at someone else’s copy. The book opens with the dog’s death by apparent poisoning. From the discussion, I gathered that this dog had had human-like aspirations for partnership and motherhood, all set against a Colombian backdrop involving actual humans. Something I have not mastered in my own writing is that often less is more, that much can be conveyed with a few carefully chosen words, as in this novel. What also impressed me is how book publishing has changed in the digital age, allowing a book not even written in English, likely with a very small circulation, to end up as a printed book, also available electronically or as an audiobook. The group’s next read is El oido miope (The miopic ear).

Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony has certainly showcased partisanship. At his public hearing, Democrats focused on Trump, while Republicans emphasized that Cohen has admitted lying before, so why should we believe him now? They asked nothing about Trump’s alleged misdeeds and used some of their brief time allotment to express support for “the wall” and other Trump administration projects. Trump must have felt torn being so far away in Vietnam with Kim, but even that was not enough to distract the public from his troubles here at home. Nonetheless, Republicans have a point. If Cohen lied under oath before, how do we know he is telling the truth now?

Trump has been stubbornly resistant to Obama’s assertion that he was born in Hawaii and rejects the mounting evidence on climate change, but he has been quick to believe Kim when he says he did not know about the mistreatment of American Otto Warmbier and gives the benefit of the doubt to Saudi Prince Crown Mohammed bin Salman in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

I’d like to see a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate other than tried and true centrist stalwart Joe Biden, but, of course, if he should be the one running against Trump, of course, I would vote for him.

Is it antisemitic to criticize Israel? That country and its leadership can be subjected to criticism, just like anywhere and anybody else. Did Minnesota Congresswoman Omar go too far? Quite possibly, that’s a question of judgment. Of course, Trump has led the way in disparaging people, both as individuals and as members of ethnic or other groups, including women.

Pope Francis was once a fresh face leading the Catholic church, an inclusive and big-hearted pope from Latin America, popular around the world with people of all faiths. Now he is mired in one church sex scandal after another, first, clergy preying on underage boys, then priests sexually assaulting nuns and other women as well as male seminarians and everything being covered up. As many of us have long advocated: open up the Catholic priesthood to married persons and women. While adult women occasionally do seduce underage boys, mostly cases of female teachers getting too close to male students (another power dynamic), such incidents are relatively rare compared to sexual aggression perpetrated by adult males. Nor is marriage necessarily a hedge against sexual exploitation, as Weinstein, Cosby, and Sandusky have amply demonstrated. We are talking here only about averages and about reducing the probabilities of sexual exploitation. The Catholic church also has a substantial shortage of priests which would be addressed by a more expansive measure. Francis seems open to the idea of married male priests. That at least would be a start.

One has to wonder if the celibacy requirement for Catholic clergy has encouraged gay men ad pedophiles to join in an effort to curb their sexual desires? It does seem that priestly ranks have attracted a disproportionate share of each, or is only that we are seeing such men being prominently discovered within the ranks of one of the world’s largest religions?

And while we are talking about reform within the Catholic church, there also needs to be a flattening of the hierarchy and encouragement of more lay responsibility and authority; at least, that’s on my own wish list and something that seems to actually be happening, though only very slowly. Yes, I have a wish list not only for an American government free of Donald Trump and all vestiges of Trumpism, but of a Catholic church free of sexual exploitation and excessive top-down authority. These are not impossible dreams and I, along with others, must do my part to help make them a reality both in our country and in the church. As I’ve tried to show in my books and in the example of my own life, even ordinary people like you and me can and do make essential contributions to humankind and to the weaving of the ongoing fabric of our shared human life here on earth.

Dare I mention the role of testosterone in promoting sexual and physical aggression? That seems to be largely ignored. Testosterone production in human males as well as animals influences both physical and sexual aggression, as well as the development of strength and endurance. Women’s ovaries also produce testosterone, but at relatively low levels. And men also produce low levels of estrogen, which in women promotes breast and scalp hair growth and other female characteristics. The whole controversy now around male-to-female transgender athletes is based on the fact that such athletes, if they transition after puberty, still maintain high levels of testosterone, giving them a huge advantage in terms of speed and strength in sports competition beyond what females from birth can usually achieve, no matter how hard they train.

Male primates and other warm-blooded animals are more sexually and physically aggressive than females for reasons having nothing to do with social norms. While human boys and men can be socialized to curb their physical and sexual urges, these are probably stronger in most men than in most women and stronger than many women realize. Some women don’t understand that male aggression, including sexual aggression, is not just a matter of self-control and proper socialization, though that is important, but also of biology. Acknowledgment of this fact has sometimes been overlooked in discussions of the me-too movement and of male celibacy in the Catholic church, as well as of male sports prowess and excessive incarceration rates, as though human behavior is rooted only in cultural and social norms. Most men do have more challenges than most women in curbing urges toward sexual and physical aggression.

Dreams are often intriguing if we can remember them. I had a very vivid recent dream about a neighbor who drove his daughter and me to the airport post-haste, lest we miss our flight to Hawaii. At the airport, we ran into my late son Andrew, alive and well, as he usually is in my dreams. I asked him if he was going to Hawaii too, but he said he was just returning from there.

Such a dream was an odd mixture, harkening back to the attendance by this man’s daughter and me at my daughter Stephanie's wedding in Honolulu in 2003. It was a memorable outdoor event held by the seaside. I had traveled all the way from Peace Corps in Honduras to attend. As my Honduras book recounts, I also had memorable dreams during my Peace Corps service, fueled, it seems, by anti-malarial drugs. Our unconscious can be quite imaginative and entertaining.

A longtime Amnesty West Africa staff member stationed in Paris, Gaëtan Mootoo, 65, committed suicide last year, saying he felt overwhelmed by the work. There was a hue and cry on-line about how much AI pressures its employees and now AI is giving his family the equivalent of almost $1.3 million in compensation and 7 top AI officials have offered to resign after another suicide of a younger staff member working out of the Geneva office. (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development.) Mootoo memorials are being held at AI conferences around the globe. Perhaps the amount of compensation is fully justified, given that Mootoo was a veteran employee supporting his family. And I do not belittle the work pressures, as human rights’ work is never done. I am a witness to that myself, even just as a volunteer for the last 38 years, which is why I have recently taken on 2 helpers for the Caribbean, one for Jamaica, the other, the DR. However, I would question whether AI work pressures alone were to blame for Mootoo’s suicide, though probably confronting the many human rights challenges in his sphere contributed to his sense of helplessness and inadequacy. Looked at objectively, was it rational to confront those challenges by completely absenting himself from the world? At age 65, after so many years, he might have retired or resigned in dignity, or even taken a leave of absence as other AI staffers have done. He could have insisted on getting more help. Was AI too quick to take major blame when usually personal, health, and relationship factors contribute substantially to a suicide? Just asking.

Va. Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax, like Clarence Thomas before him, characterizes the accusations against him as a “lynching.” That line of defense is no more credible for him than it was for Thomas. In fact, it seems to have reduced his credibility.

Quite obviously, former TV star Jussie Smollett has done considerable harm to future victims of actual racist and homophobic attacks. However, if he wanted more publicity, he certainly has gotten it, and some of his fans will defend him no matter what, just as fans defend Trump and also the late Michael Jackson, despite contrary evidence.

After my return, my daughter Melanie and I were able to visit son Jon in Berkeley Springs, W Va, a town he moved to after being injured by a robber in Honolulu.

Now, about my Honduras trip

Before I left, I gathered some items in my living room.

I was fortunate to meet up with former Peace Corps health volunteer Sandy, who, like me, has health projects in Honduras, in her case, for clubfoot, something I have tackled in the past.

I also met again with Luis, who had worked with me in the Peace Corps office in La Esperanza, now stationed in the capital with the Honduran Red Cross. He has told me that the Red Cross tries to help deportees threatened in their original homes move to new locations. [photo]

Honduran newspapers and TV news reports are not shy about showing lurid photos of blood and dead bodies. Newspapers are 80+ pages thick with lots of classified ads, including some showing photos of houses or cars for sale.

Relatively few private homes have internet access. Most people pay by the hour at internet cafes.

At a home in the capital, Tegucigalpa, the maid Maria showed me how to make round tortillas, not by rotating palms, I had been taught to do, but by pressing round balls of dough flat under a piece of wax paper.

That home had two tiny but very shrill barking dogs set off by any unfamiliar sound. Like all Honduran dogs, they were hardly lap dogs, always staying outside, in this case in an interior patio.

The daughter in this family donned a costume for a function at her private school.

I also visited a public school in the capital, where many students are US-born, having been deported with their parents. While I consider Honduran public education to have overcrowded classrooms and too much reliance on rote learning, as well as stereotyped gender roles, the children still enjoy going to school and are getting more education that many of their parents.

No photos appear here from the residential school for the blind in Tegucigalpa, which absolutely forbids photos, lest they be used for phony fundraising. The numbers of children in the residential school keeps shrinking, with most now coming from rural areas where mainstreaming of students with disabilities has not yet taken place. That integration of blind and other students with disabilities into regular schools was encouraged by me and others and is now actually taking place.

In walking outdoors almost anywhere in Honduras, my balance is challenged by uneven streets and sidewalks, as well as by huge holes and, sometimes, by fallen power lines. Back home in DC, going out on errands or to interpretation assignments, I am able to navigate on fairly smooth sidewalks and across paved streets to and from metro and bus stops. But in Honduras, I experience balance problems walking on unfamiliar terrain, mostly because when I was in Peace Corps there, a lightning strike and thunderclap landed frightenly close to my right ear (as described in my Honduras book), permanently affecting my equilibrium and also my hearing in that ear, but fortunately not killing me.

Before leaving from Tegucigalpa for the south, I gave a bunch of dental supplies to a dentist there to distribute as she saw fit.

Traveling this year on commercial buses between cities, although many vendors still got on and off to sell food and patent medicines, I did not see any vendors this time who appeared younger than 12. I wonder if they have been outlawed?

On the bus from Teguc (pronounced TEY-goose) to Choluteca in the south, we passengers were hit by a sudden familiar blast of stifling heat as we descended into a lower altitude. I carried my personal belongings with me in the passenger section, reached only by climbing up enormous steps. The wheelchair, walker, and suitcase of medical supplies I was taking with me had been stored in the bus’s underneath compartment. Our bus stopped 3 times at convenience stores and fast food establishments along the way, presumably facilities operated by friends of the driver. The driver of this and other buses used only a manual shift, as do most cars in Honduras, including cabs (and they also favor diesel fuel). The bus driver is always accompanied by a youthful fare taker who collects from each passenger. Because the various stops delayed our trip south, I had to use the restroom at the last stop, something to be avoided if at all possible. The smell hits you before you actually get to the open door where a pila (large cement water basin) divides 2 windowless open dark rooms, one on the left for women, on the right for men. No toilet paper, of course. When finished, you are supposed to scoop up water from the pila using an empty can left there to flush, but I skipped that step in my eagerness to reach fresh air.

On the subject of bath rooms, in Teguc and in the much colder climate of La Esperanza, shower water is heated, if at all, by an electroducha, a scary looking electrical switch turned on in the shower head, which often doesn’t work. In Choluteca, even in the fanciest homes, there is only cold water, because who needs a warm shower in that climate? In El Triunfo, it’s just a matter of pouring pila water over your body. A pila is a cement water collection tank filled up when only water is available. On the side of a pila is a corrugated built-in washboard and a drain for the outflow of wash or rinse water scooped up from the pila with a plastic bowl.

Above are the clothes I washed.

My friend Gustavo, a judge in the Choluteca court (as per my Honduras book), opines that the southern region is less attractive to criminal gangs because of the intense year-round heat, usually rising to 100 F and above during the six months or more of the dry season. Even in the rainy season, and in the slightly shorter days of December, or at night, it rarely descends below the high 80’s. In my more than 2 years living in the south with the Peace Corps, I always slept with an open window, an electric fan (if there was electricity), and a mosquito net. I have known Gustavo since 1992, when we both were invited to a Spanish-language course in human rights conducted by the Inter-American Court of Human rights in San Jose, Costa Rica.

While Gustavo is a judge, Honduras, like other Latin American countries, does not have jury trials, too dangerous for jurors, subjecting them to perhaps life-threatening pressures. For the same reason, security officers wear black face masks covering all but their eyes when arraigning prisoners or bringing them into court.

Gustavo's family above with live-in servant and her sister, who stays with her..

Before traveling to El Triunfo to donate a wheelchair, walker, and medical supplies to the health and rehab centers there, I stopped by San Jose Obrero, a Choluteca Goodwill-type store featuring donated goods from the US. The Cuban priest who operates it is able to transport donations back to Honduras free-of-charge in empty banana shipping containers. He has offered to transport items for me for free as well, but I have not been able to get them into the containers when they are in port in Miami nor to arrange for their transport from La Ceiba on the Honduran north coast, where the ships dock.

All the donated wheelchairs at Obrero had missing footrests, just like the ones I had to get rid of after they donated to me last year. And those chairs were exceptionally pricey. The priest in charge explained to me that he had to charge high prices to support his own rehab center. However, I did buy a set of crutches there to take to El Triunfo.

In Choluteca, I also visited the market stall, El Regalon (the Give-away), family of Lesly, a young doctor I worked with in El Triunfo, now married to former Peace Corps volunteer Sam. She is working as a nurse practitioner, and living with him and their 2 daughters in the US. I called them Loni and Seth in my Honduras book for their privacy, but now they don’t mind being identified. Lesly’s dad says chicken sales are generating less income now because of competition.

Above,paterfamilias at market stall

Granddaughter eating lunch and with brother showing magic towels.

Pinatas are for sale in a neighboring stall.

I’d scheduled my trip to El Triunfo for Thurs., Feb. 14, but, alas, Valentine’s Day, I soon discovered, is a big holiday in town. I didn’t recall that from the time I lived there. The health and rehab centers were both closed and band and concession stands were being set up in the park. Nonetheless, because I’d advised in advance about the date of my arrival, Doctora Jeanette and a few other staffers were waiting for me at the health center, though not technically on duty.

Above, staff who showed up to greet me, with items I had brought.

A few patients also had shown up. The staff told me where to deliver the wheelchair, to an 82-year-old man who had suffered a stroke, paralyzing his left side, meaning the stroke had occurred on the brain’s right side, so he still had speech, though was barely audible. He was lying in bed, naked except for an adult diaper because of the heat.

When his sons placed him in the wheelchair, he smiled and thanked me. They wheeled him around and even outside. His granddaughter is holding one of the magic towels unfurled.

With a sense of futility, I brought some more books to would-be librarian Pedro Joaquin. More than 15 years on, we still don’t have the library. My friend who died last year and had visited me in Peace Corps, insisted that money for the library was included in her will, but when she died last year, no money was there. We are still at ground zero on the library, an idea that has evolved as libraries have evolved beyond just physical books.

Thank goodness for moto-taxis taking me and my gear all around El Triunfo, saving me from nearly melting in the heat, though I was sweating. The little girl is holding her magic towel.

One stop was at the home of the mother of a girl with spina bifida whom I had helped get a wheelchair and water mattress, but who had finally succumbed to bed sores. I always give the mother some cash and this time I also gave her a suitcase, now emptied of its contents. She said a suitcase was just what she needed to take with her to Teguc, where she was soon scheduled to have surgery.

New electric stove and refrigerator, but housewife prefers her old open fire wood stove.

Above, kids typically potty train themselves by going bare bottomed.

Pedro Joaquin's twin 17-year-old daughters with his wife. I remember when they were born. (At the time. I gave their mother calcium tablets from my Peace Corps medical kit.)

While I’ve taken crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs to Honduras over the years, it has always been only a single wheelchair, represented to the airline as my own. But now, I am rethinking that strategy. Would it be worthwhile just to pay for one more item of extra luggage, since I always have to pay anyway outgoing, though not on the return, where I only have a carry-on? On this last trip, the layover in Miami for my flight to Honduras approached 4 hours. During that time, an attendant to whom I gave a $5 tip had parked me in a circle occupied by other wheelchair users and there I sat among them, unable to go anywhere else, even to the restroom, lest I blow my cover. I decided it was not worthwhile just to save a few dollars.

Then I discovered a WalMart in Teguc! Going there, I further discovered, yes, an actual wheelchair on display, so I took a photo. However, I don’t recall the footrests exactly, as in my photo, it looks like there may be just a sort of belt instead of actual footrests. I was told that several wheelchairs were available, all of the same type. Those wheelchairs each cost about $50 more than a basic manual chair in the US.

Heck, for $50, I would gladly be done with transporting a wheelchair with me on the plane. I could still take a walker--much easier. Hondurans were horrified that I would be willing to spend $50 more to avoid flying down there with a wheelchair, but if I should travel there again next Feb., WalMart in Teguc seems to be the way to go. I might even buy 2 wheelchairs to take to El Triunfo! It would seem most practical for wheelchairs to be manufactured right there in Honduras, but apparently no one has taken on that initiative. It may be because few folks who need a wheelchair can actually afford to buy one.

The San Felipe public hospital in Teguc is over 100 years old and occupies an extra-large city block in a dicey part of town, encompassing almost a small town within itself, with guards at all entrances, internal parking for staff, interior tree-lined patios and flower gardens, cafeterias, wards, operating rooms, and confusing long winding hallways. It is a labyrinth that is hard to navigate and easy to get lost in.

A sign on the hospital's front door announced the Operation Smile (Operacion Sonrisa) medical brigade.

First, I delivered donated eyeglasses to the women’s ophthalmology dept.

In the hallways, armed guards wearing face masks stood stock still,

All staff, including volunteers like me, worst identifying buttons, citing 75 years of Operation Smile at the hospital. I have been told there has never been a fatality in all the years of such surgeries at this hospital.

I also had to wear hospital garb.

Patients waiting for each day’s surgery had to fast. Some were having follow-up surgeries. My impression is that because of better prenatal nutrition, especially of folic acid. There are fewer and mostly less severe cases.