Santa Rosa

I went with four other teachers to Santa Rosa this weekend. We had a good time... Santa Rosa is a small town just 45 minutes away from Gracias. We just wanted to get out of Villa Verde for a day and get some good coffee and watch cable TV, and we did those things. It was great.

Santa Rosa isn't anything special. It has some bigger grocery stores than we do here in Gracias. It has a cute park, a pretty church, and a variety of places to eat. It also has a great deal of poverty. We have poverty in Gracias, to be sure. But poverty elsewhere in Honduras is a little different than what we see in Gracias. Here, we have people living in tiny mud huts and in extremely poor living conditions, but in bigger cities like Santa Rosa, there are children everywhere who just seem to be on their own. They sell random things, they're always dirty, they never have anything on their feet. When we first arrived in the city, a little boy who looked to be seven to eight years old kept following us around, trying to get us to buy socks. I asked him how old he was, and he told me twelve. He said that he's small because he doesn't eat anything. I just couldn't believe that he was twelve, but one of the Honduran teachers who came with us confirmed that many children here simply don't look their age because they are malnourished. I gave the boy some money and another teacher bought a pair of socks, but the situation with the children makes me feel so helpless, because I just can't give all of them enough money.

The next day, these two little boys followed us into a coffeeshop and just stood there while we drank our coffee and ate our cookies. We bought their popcorn and their peanuts, but they still wouldn't leave. It made me feel terrible and pretty helpless. In a practical sense, I didn't know what to do about it. I didn't know whether to be super compassionate or standoffish. After we bought their things, they still didn't leave and I just wasn't sure what to do. Seeing children like that just breaks my heart. They should be in school, or playing with their friends. These kids don't have a childhood, they're selling old food on the street in the hopes of getting fifty cents from us. Kids shouldn't have to do that.

Poverty is so hard to see. It's hard because I don't know what to do about it, it makes me feel guilty (why am I so privileged when other people are struggling so much?), and it's just easier to ignore, sometimes. I often think about Haiti. After the earthquake, people worked so hard to send money and aid over there, and that's great. But I think it's important to remember that it took a natural disaster and hundreds of thousands of deaths to get people to stop ignoring the poverty that has been there since long before the earthquake struck. That's not a criticism of the aid... it's just an observation that I think we need to keep in mind.

I don't like feeling helpless. I wish I had a satisfying end to this blog post, but I don't. I enjoyed my weekend away in Santa Rosa, but it made me astutely aware of what I have and how lucky I am. It also made me astutely aware of how much work still needs to be done in our world.