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| Workshop participants discuss citizens' rights |
The people in the room are all too familiar with the many problems facing Honduran families and communities. But they obviously don't get mad easily, and the
facilitator is gently nudging them toward a little more indignation.
Honduras has a constitution, he reminds them. The country’s
leaders have signed numerous international agreements recognizing human rights,
gender equity, fair processes for its citizens. But that's on paper, not in the way daily life unfolds for most Hondurans.
Today was my first full day on the job with the Comision de Accion Social Menonita, and the first chance
I’ve had to see my new boss, Merlin Fuentes, in action. It turns out he’s an
excellent facilitator. And any Canadian old enough to remember the ‘60s - or
the women’s rights movement - would have recognized what he was trying to do at
the workshop. He was waking people up to their own power.
The problems in Honduras are much more extreme than in
Canada, but not totally unfamiliar. People feel disconnected from their government and
powerless to effect change. They see money flowing among those who have plenty,
but almost none of it trickling down to those on the ground.
Their children receive little or no education. Their
unemployment rate is closing in on 40 per cent. Their murder rate is staggering
- 54 times the Canadian rate, and No. 1 in the world right now. Their access to
health care ranges from minimal to non-existent, and for the most part people
rely on folk cures and luck.
Unbelievably terrible things happen every day in Honduras. In
the last week alone, a devastating prison fire killed more than 350 people and
an equally devastating fire in a market district near the country’s capital destroyed
the workplaces and the inventory of more than 800 vendors. With not even a
shred of a social net to break the fall, those affected will plunge to new lows
of poverty that will virtually ensure their children and their children’s
children remain in a lifelong state of deprivation.
The country’s media deliver a new outrage every day - 200
sick babies baking in an non-air-conditioned pediatric emergency ward in San
Pedro Sula; a government worker shot to death while riding his motorcycle to
work at 5 a.m.; yet another public school trying to get by with no desks, no school
supplies and far too few teachers.
You’d think Hondurans would have no need for
consciousness-raising at this point, or for anyone to awaken their sense of
outrage. But when generation after generation grows up in poverty and
deprivation, it can start to feel like the norm. It’s not that people have
given up - it’s that they’ve lost sight of there even being an alternative.
What can be done? Aid, sure, and all those nice things that
Western countries like to do. But real change always has to come from within. One
taller at a time, more people will
find their voice. For the sake of this lovely but bedeviled country and its people, I will hope for that.
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