When I arrived in Honduras, it was a time of great upheavals and political strife. Honduras was literally surrounded by countries on all sides which were entangled in civil wars and rebellions. The armed conflicts were raging on all fronts when I arrived there in the early 1980s.
To the south, Nicaragua had just fallen to communism and a group or guerilla warriors called the Contras, who opposed the communist government, had stationed themselves in Honduras just north of the Nicaraguan border and were using Honduras as a safe haven for their operations. The USA, at this time, who was allied with Honduras, was secretly supporting this group which led to a great scandal later on, but was unknown at that time.
Whenever things got too hot for them in Nicaragua, the Contras would retreat over the border into Honduras believing that the communist troops wouldn't dare follow them. And, they were right. Honduras had amassed hundreds of troops along its southern border to ensure that it's sovereignty was respected by Nicaragua, but the Contra's presence in Honduras was a source of great contention between the two nations which nearly resulted in a declaration of war and armed hostilities. But that is a story for another time.
To the southwest was El Salvador which had just started fighting a brutal civil war in 1979. The war lasted for thirteen years, finally ending in 1992, but was very hot during the entire time I spent in Honduras. Many people from El Salvador were assassinated and disappeared during this time and many thousands more fled the country seeking asylum wherever they could find it.
I knew some who had fled so rapidly that they were forced to leave everything behind if they were to save their lives. One such family I met in Honduras that was forced out of El Salvador was extremely wealthy before they left. They lived in the finest section of San Salvador in a sprawling mansion, had servants and sent their children to Europe to be educated. One of their daughters was fluent in seven languages.
They lost everything but their lives when they relocated to Honduras. And, when I knew them, they barely made enough money doing menial labor to supply the food they needed to survive. They were unable to get anything other than the lowest paying, most unpleasant sorts of jobs because they were considered outsiders and were viewed many times by those native to Honduras harshly and without compassion because they increased the competition for jobs already in very scarce supply.
In El Salvador they were targeted for assassination because of their great wealth. Sometimes eliminating people of means so that their wealth could be seized was the quickest and most direct route to funding a war.
I admired these people very much. During my many conversations with them it became obvious that they missed the wealth and privilege they were forced to leave behind. Nevertheless, they faced the life ahead, a life devoid of the security, leisure and power to which they had become accustomed, with a cheerful courage which was infectious and endearing. They were very gracious and accommodating in the way they treated others and faced their new life in the very lowest echelons of society.
Then, to the northwest was Guatemala. It too was embroiled in a bloody civil war which lasted thirty six years, longer than any other war in the region, finally ending in 1996.
Honduras was the only island of sanity and stability which succeeded in maintaining a measure of some security in the region. But even so, many times the hostilities of these other nations and rebel groups was exported to Honduras and the bloodshed and terror of war spilled across its borders regularly.
The second week I was in Honduras, an electrical substation was bombed by terrorists and we were without power for over a week. A month later, a water main was attacked and destroyed and we went without water for a couple of weeks.
One of my companions witnessed the armed kidnapping of a citizen from the USA who pleaded with him for help as he was forced into a car. It all happened so quickly that my companion didn't have time to process what was happening or do anything to help. He remembered the man pleading...Please, you're an American. Help me! But it all happened so quickly that there was nothing he could do to help.
Americans were often prime targets for kidnapping because the insurgents believed that they could be used in negotiations with the United States government to get the things they needed or wanted.
I remember in one of our travels that we knocked on a door to see if anyone who resided there would be interested in our message. And after the door was opened, there were two men standing in front of us. I looked past them and saw three or four more standing behind them. As soon as the door opened both my companion and I felt a very real sense of dread and fear and we knew immediately that something was wrong at this house. So, we briefly stated who we were and left them a couple of pamphlets and got out of there as fast as we could.
A couple of weeks later, that house was surrounded by the military and men were being marched out at gun point. The talk on the street was that it was a terrorist cell which was planning an attack of some sort on the capital city.
I feel certain that this was one time that the Lord protected us by the way He made us feel. As soon as the door was opened the hair stood up on the back of my neck. The feeling was thick and palpable. The Lord protected me many times on my mission, this being high up and among them.
It was because of the constant threat of terrorist activity that the military had such an overt presence in the country. There were men stationed all over the capital city with automatic weapons. The military performed physical searches of all commercial outbound and inbound busses and flights both domestic and international.
On the way out of Tegucigalpa, when we traveled by bus, they would stop us shortly after leaving the city lining all of the passengers up along the outside of the bus while they took whatever time they wanted going through our things. A couple of soldiers with guns would be stationed to watch us while the search was being performed and would randomly ask several of us to produce documentation proving citizenship or residency. I had my luggage searched anytime I left or returned to Tegucigalpa and had to produce the documents granting me residence whenever it was requested.
This was done to create a sense of control and security so that life could continue despite the very real danger that the terrorists posed. And, for the most part, it worked. The military was quite effective in stopping many of the planned attacks and life did go on in a pretty normal fashion.
But the periods of calm were inevitably punctuated with the fear and devastation that a successful attack brought with it and these attacks forced thoughts and fears suppressed and controlled from the back recesses of our mind to the forefront of conscious thought.
These feelings and thoughts would dominate conversation for awhile until they could once again be properly packed away and pushed back down into the darker places where thoughts of the sorts of things none of us want to entertain or deal with on a daily basis are safely stored until they are thrust back into the white light of conscious thought by another senseless, brutal act.
Because of the state of affairs surrounding the country, Honduras had a great need to bolster its military to meet the security needs it faced at that time. A very real threat of war seemed imminent.
I remember one day when my companion had to go into the city to conduct some business. On this day, he left me back in San Miguel, a barrio of Tegucigalpa (think suburb), with a member of our church and told me to conduct a street meeting.
Street meetings were impromptu meetings where we would set up a display of some sort, usually involving pictures, and then we would speak loudly enough that we would grab the attention of those around us and would try to teach something about who we were and what we believed. We would hold these meetings in the most populous locations of whatever city we worked in and so this meeting took place in the town square, a very crowded and public place.
The young man I was with was a little shy and so he said nothing and did nothing to help as I began to make a spectacle of myself. As I did so, most people, as you might suspect, distanced themselves from me, but there were always several who would be interested enough to stop and listen to the tall white Gringo from the United States of America.
Yes, it was a form of entertainment for some who would laugh at us and try to make us look and feel ridiculous when we performed, but there were always several who were sincerely interested.
It was a strategy I used several times throughout my mission with pretty good success. And, we would give out copies of the Book of Mormon for free which many people liked. Free stuff is always a crowd pleaser and was quite a novel and unexpected concept to a people totally unaccustomed to getting anything for free. That simply never happened in Hondoras at that time.
I had just started talking and had begun to get a small crowd gathering around me when without warning the people in the square were running in all directions. Within a matter of a few seconds, the entire square was emptied of people, including the young man who was supposed to stay with me until my companion returned.
So you understand the magnitude of what had just happened, you need to realize that moments before the empty square where I now stood was teeming with hundreds of people. Their disappearance happened so quickly and efficiently that it was a little disorienting.
I was trying desperately to figure out what had just happened and was beginning to question my own safety and wonder if I needed to run too. I didn't run mostly because I didn't know where to run. If something was happening which threatened me I had no idea where to go to avoid it, and so I just stood there in the middle of the square all alone and very confused.
Moments later several large military trucks surrounded the square and dozens of soldiers poured out of them and began searching the surrounding neighborhoods.
I learned later, after the soldiers had left the area, that they were rounding up candidates for conscription. I also learned that one of their favorite tactics in searching for conscripts was to wait until a popular movie was playing at the local theater and then seal the exits and sort through everyone in the audience and detain those of the appropriate age who couldn't prove prior military service.
Many young men would go to the movies and simply fail to return home. Sometimes it would take a couple of weeks before their families were notified by the military that their son's service in the military had begun and that they were safe. But, when this happened, notification simply served to confirm what was already, for the most part, common knowledge. Everyone knew what had likely happened. But even so, notification was important in that it brought closure and certainty in knowing that their loved ones were safe and that something far worse had not happened to them.
When a young man reached the age when he became eligible for conscription, he was legally obligated to present himself to authorities for service in the military forces of Honduras. But, because the census records of Honduras were all hand written and stored physically in file cabinets spread across the entire country, there was no way for the military to know who should be reporting at any given time. So, most men refused to report and played a game of cat and mouse with the military hoping to avoid conscription. The day I stood all alone in the town square, I learned how the military countered this strategy.
By now I had been in Honduras a little over a month, and I was beginning to learn and understand this country more and more every day. It was, for me, still a strange thing to be in Honduras and I was routinely surprised at what I found there as I intermingled my life with the lives of those who were native Catrachos. I did, however, feel less and less shock at what I saw and learned compassion as I began to accept their way of life and understand what their world was like.
Life was very different there. Some of the differences between life in Honduras and the safe privileged life I had left behind were very unpleasant and unfair. But I found that inevitably, the unpleasant aspects of life in Honduras were not chosen but rather forced upon the people who lived there.
None of them chose the poverty, disease, corruption and war which were a constant part of their every day lives. The amazing thing about these remarkable people was in the way they faced these challenges. They faced them with courage and dignity and pursued their lives with faith in God and kindness and respect for their fellow man.
I was always a gringo and never a Catracho (slang for native Honduran) no matter how hard I tried to fit in. But in the end that didn't matter much because there was never another time in my entire life when I felt more loved and accepted by a people than I did then. It was my genuine and sincere honor and privilege to live among them for a short time. I miss Honduras and its people very much.
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