The Country I Live In

I remember when I was a small kid, my mother told me that she had a conversation with a friend of hers who had married a Norwegian or Swede who was a captain on one of the United Fruit Company's banana vessels. The Scandinavian bought a house in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, a real nice house in one of the better parts of town. Well he sent a picture of the house to his family and one of them wrote back saying they were surprised, they thought all we had in this country were shacks or huts.

Now, yes, Honduras has been the second poorest country in America for a long time, only Haiti is poorer, and that still is so today. But that does not mean we live like primitives, what I talked about above happened in the late '60s, Tegucigalpa was a small city of maybe 250,000 inhabitants but it was a nice place. It had a cool climate, there was not so much traffic, crime was low, money was hard to come buy but most everything was very cheap, people actually could live with what they earned even though this was very little.

Source Tegucigalpa capital of Honduras

Today this same city has about 1.5 million inhabitants, it has a lot of buildings and even some let's say junior skyscrapers up to 25 stories in height. It has nice four lane streets, malls, first rate movie theaters a nice night life etc. On the other hand the center of the city which is colonial is very run down, it has very narrow streets that are in very bad shape, crime is very high, and like before money is very hard to get, but now a day's wage is not enough to buy food.

Tegucigalpa is situated about 3,000 feet above sea level and used to have a cool climate with refreshing mountain winds, that is not so now, it is just another hot tropical town. That is one of the reasons I do think man has something to do with climate change.

This downward trend in living conditions has been constant in this country, I know because I am going to be 57 years old so I have seen the change. Today we receive over 4 billion USD in remittances from people who have emigrated mostly to the US but also to Europe and other parts ( I think there is a Honduran in every country you can think of) and this is a big chunk of what the government considers the GDP, I personally think this should not be included. But this money is just like a palliative, the people who receive it are able to live on a month to month basis but there is no way to save for the future, except of course those families that have 6 or even 8 members abroad.

We have, and have always had a lousy government, a military that is more powerful than it should be, police that are not too efficient, government employees who are on the take etc, these are problems that I think are present all over the world.

But in reality Honduras is a nice country, people are actually very nice, foreigners are treated fine, and there are really a lot of spots that should be attractive for tourists. We have the Bay Islands with the second largest coral reef in the world, Copan a beautiful Mayan city, The Mosquitia region which is completely isolated and has not been reached by "progress', a lot of colonial towns, more than half of the country is mountains, we have a vary varied and numerous flora and fauna, we have jaguars, tapirs, all kinds of snakes (Ok I don't think that is an asset).

So overall I think we do have more positives than negatives, but still life is difficult in this country and very little is being done to get people out of their economic problems, this is the main reason these guys emigrate, they just can't see a way out of their problems staying here.