Culture Accepted as Truth

This last week I finished my work with the camps. I’ve said this before, but I’m so glad that I’ve gotten to help with them because I’ve seen such a wonderful effect of the work. Amanda and Andrew came to visit me on the weekend and we had a good time hanging out and talking. I also took each of them on a short moto ride and they both got pretty scared, but they managed well in the end.

One thing that has been very interesting to see is how some cultural taboos work. In North America, most everyone except for some young women have never danced moving their hips from side to side, in fact most think it’s not possible. If a North American tries it, they will undoubtedly laugh out of embarrasement and convince themselves not to try it again. Men would never dance moving their hips. Here, all you have to do is demonstrate how you want the jovenes (young adults) to move their hips, and they (the non-evangelicals, at least) get to it right away, without a hint of embarassment. Either that or they say they can’t do it and watch in envy.

Cheating also has a contrasting taboo. In North America, cheating is generally prohibited, unless you’re playing one of those card games that is based on it. Whether we’re playing Mafia, walking around blindfolded, or answering surveys, cheating normally comes out as the prefered method to complete the task at hand. If theres another way to do it that seems like it might be easier, people go for it. There seems to be no real concern for ‘the letter of the law,’ sometimes even when it is repeated and reiterated that it must be followed. Cheating appears to be fully acceptable.

That perception of mine makes me wonder if that’s how so many government officials get away with corruption. Two of La Campa’s three hotels are owned by former mayors, along with one or more nice vehicles. The current mayor has a very nice truck and several large milking cows, which together have a value of around 6 years of his actual salary. I’m not saying that any of them pocketed La Campa funds, but its just a little suspicious that the three (by far) most well-well off families in La Campa have held La Campas highest government post.

I am fascinated that depending on where you grow up, you can develop distinct attitudes toward the same thing. In La Campa, we admire a man who can shake his hips. We understand that cheating is acceptable. We crave meat, beans, and tortillas. We see a hungry man unless a woman is close by to cook and serve him food. We go to bed at 9pm and get up at 5am. We ask why the present NGOs aren’t giving us houses and petroleum-based fertilizers. We wonder how, without the NGO’s constant donations, we can ever make our country developed and respectable. We see green grass and we look for the horse or cow that should be eating it. We look for tasty/medicinal monte (shurbs) and mushrooms on the road or path that we walk on. We talk in hushed voices about the corruption we see up the street. We are so busy incriminating politicians that talking about solutions hardly crosses our minds.

We’re so used to all this, we can’t even imagine things any other way. We’re convinced that the way we see it is the (t / T)ruth. But then breaking that in ourselves and in others is why cultural exchange is always so rich and rewarding.

El Gran Reto

The camps I`ve been helping with recently have been wonderful. They`re paid for and staffed by multiple institutions, PLAN International, World Vision, and a bunch of Honduran NGOs. Its really amazing and exciting to see young people develop leadership, teamwork, and critical thinking skills over a couple of days. Its really dramatic.

So many institutions working together can be a headache. On Thursday I went into Gracias and walked an hour to the camp site to find out that I had to make it back to La Campa because it had been decided to do the camp right outside of La Campa. Someone had decided to change it the night before and I hadn´t been informed. I was a little furious. But when I got to La Campa, I hung out with the institution people until it was decided that not enough young people showed up in the municipality to go ahead with the camp. In that municipality, turnout is generally low because people walk up to 6 hours just to get to the town center. We, the leaders, went on a hike for fun up a river, climbed up a ravine wall to see a cave where guaro (moonshine) used to be made. I only felt like my life was in danger a few times on the ravine wall, so we´ll praise the Lord for that.

I ended up going to the other camp that was going on in another municipality that I had never been to. I went in a car, a shiny new Ford Explorer, that had been donated to the camp NGO by USAID. SUVs like that don´t exist here except for maybe a couple in the cities. We were listening to techno and mainstream rap from the US. Also we were driving with the windows usp, and since no one could see through the extra-balck tint on the windows, they just looked at the USAID sticker on the side of the car. We were a good personification of a lot of aid money, self-serving, impersonal, and oblivious to the reality surrounding us.

At one point at the camp, we saw smoke rising from a hill fairly close to our camp. When the wind picked up, the coordintor guy said we should check it out to see if it was a controlled burn or not. Four of us then went on a super-exciting, physics-defying, absolutely terrifying motorcycle ride, me on the back, up an extremely treacherous footpath to fight a forest fire. We triumphantly fought one side of the fire, saving maybe an acre or two of forest.

The rest of the camp consisted of giving ridiculous-seeming challenges to the young people and watching them work at it until they figured it out. Its a whole lot of fun. I joked with my parter that el gran reto (the great challenge) is to climb that big pine tree over there, without touching the tree! (or cut it down with...a herring!) :O The great thing is that leadership, teamwork, and critical thinking skills develop during the challenge and everyone comes out with more confidence, knowledge, and wisdom than they had before.

El gran reto made me reflect that that is often how life is for all of us, how things work. We have a huge task set before us that seems impossible, and whether we achieve it or not, we come out with new and improved skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Of course, all this depends on our attitude. And God is the camp leader, watching, laughing about the seeming impossibility of the task, but knowing that it is developing us for our future.