Golpe de estado – day 10

As I lay in bed this morning after the alarm went off I thought of how easy it is, here in Santa Rosa de Copán, to live as though there were no crisis in Honduras. Sure, I have to be in the house during the hours of curfew – but I am not in what little night life there is here in Santa Rosa. Other things are back to near normal – many of the schools had opened and I later heard the kids walking up the street to the grade school just about a half block away.

It is very easy to inure oneself to the reality that many face.

Tuesday is my day to help out at the comedor de niños, a lunch program for poor kids that the diocese started last year. Today there were not as many kids as last week when there was no school. But what struck me were the little kids who were really malnourished. Several of the kids looked to be two or younger; one little girl was four years old and one little boy, who looked to be one, was actually two and a half years old.

Those children are the reality of Honduras.

It is still tranquil here in Santa Rosa. There were marches throughout the country – two against the coup in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa and six for the coup. In Tegucigalpa, the wife of the deposed president, Xiomara de Zelaya, who had been staying in the US Embassy, joined the marchers.

In conversations this evening I got a few insights into the marches.

One person who had been at the Sunday march in Tegucigalpa to welcome deposed President Zelaya spoke about the size of the crowd and the efforts the organizers had made to keep it peaceful. He related one event that was revealing. It was a hot day. The protesters were on one side of the barbed wire protecting the airport with the soldiers in rows on the other side. It was a very hot day and many protesters had water. Here they sell water in bottles as well as in clear plastic bags. To help the soldiers relieve their thirst one protester threw a bag of water over the fence; soon many more followed and the thirsty soldiers were enthusiastically grabbing the bags.

Another person gave me a little insight into the Saturday March for Peace and Democracy here in Santa Rosa de Copán. In San Pedro Sula and in Tegucigalpa there were often a number of posters with insulting images and slogans, anti-Zelaya. When the organizers were planning, somehow someone saw that some organizers had brought some pre-made posters that were very insulting. For example, one was a double-headed snake with images of Zelaya and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Local public officials objected and said that this was supposed to be a march for peace and democracy. The insulting posters were not used.

I hope that these two examples will guide what happens in the next few weeks.

For there is at last a little hint of a way out. Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias agreed to mediate the Honduran crisis. Arias was Costa Rican president in the 1980s when he worked to resolve the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador and the contra war in Nicaragua. He was, in my opinion, only partly successful but won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The Salvadoran civil war ended with a negotiated settlement in 1992. The Guatemalan civil war concluded a few years later. Nicaragua had a peaceful election that brought in a different government and the contras (supported by the US government) disappeared. He will be meeting with both deposed president Manuel Zelaya and interim president Roberto Micheletti this Thursday in Costa Rica. It will not be an easy or quick process, yet I hope that it will bring some measure of peace.

This evening the Franciscan sisters down the street invited me to join them to talk with a priest in his eighties who was at the march in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and Sunday. It was a fascinating conversation, but I need time to reflect on it and try to grasp the significance of all he said.

In the meantime, what I hope I can remember from today are the children at the comedor. I cam here “to be of service to those most in need” and so they need to remain the inspiration and driving force for all I do.

And so I close with these words of the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi, which I read last night before going to sleep: “Self-realization I hold to be impossible without service of and identification with the poorest.”

Not just service – but identification with them.