Bueno suerte…

Doña Hilda and I in her kitchen on my last night in San Isidro!

I´ve left behind too many people. On nearly every continent I´ve had to say goodbye to somebody who I will never see again.

 We say goodbye, shed tears, exchange kisses on the cheek.  I tell them how much they´ve influenced me, how I couldn´t have survived in (insert name of new place) without them. I try to memorize their faces, their smiles, the way their eyes look when sparkling with tears.

I will never forget Olga, the teacher at Las Quebraditas primary school. I´ll never forget the way her strong hands kneaded the dough of pan dulce, the way she ever so patiently taught a school room full of developmentally-challenged children, forever with a smile on her face. I will never forget the way we´d look at each other and just laugh for no reason at all.

But she doesn´t know that I´ll never forget. In these isolated hills of Vallecillo, Honduras, keeping in touch is more than impossible. There´s no cell phone signal in Las Quebraditas, there´s no internet café, there´s not even a post office.

¨Can I have your phone number?¨Nathaniel asks me as we hug goodbye. I sigh and look away trying to find the right words to explain the pointlessness of giving him my number.

I tell him I know what will happen as it has happened before. I won´t have international minutes and he´ll rarely have a signal. When he does call, I´ll probably be in class, and it will be too expensive to call him back. He´ll think I´m ignoring him. He´ll think I´ve forgotten him. But that´s not the case.

Sylvanus, my mentor and closest friend in Accra, Ghana, probably thinks I´ve forgotten about him. He doesn´t know I think about him and the many wisdoms he taught me every day. Ronaldo, a boy I befriended five years ago in Olmué, Chile, probably thinks I´ve long forgotten his bright brown eyes and crooked smile. He doesn´t know that I still have the woolen winter hat he rashly threw through the bus window as a parting gift when I left for the airport. 

¨When do you come back?¨ They always ask. I always say I don´t know, but maybe in a few years. I have no idea if I´ll return, my thirst to meet new people in new places will win out before I retrace my steps. And yet I tell them yes, in a few years I´ll return, and I will seek them out.

I promised my Ghanaian-host sister Barbara that when she has her first child, I´ll be there at the hospital. She sat loyally by my side in the hospital when I was sick with malaria, and one day I will return the favor. I will take care of her, take care of her children, tell them what an amazing woman their mother is.

If ever I do retrace the footsteps of my youth, I will surely drop in to remind the friends I´ve left behind that we are indeed still friends.

Today, I wished twenty children ¨bueno suerte¨(good luck) as they walked out the door  of our last class with them. I looked at their big, brown eyes that practically fill their faces, their cheeks gleaming with dirt and snot. I tried to imagine them older, and I tried to imagine them happy, successful, well-educated.

It´s impossible for them to know that ¨bueno suerte¨ means so many things: that I´ll never be able to help them again with their numbers and therefore wish them luck in school; that I imagine the families they´ll have one day, and wish them luck with their spouses and their children´s futures; that I wish that one day, they´ll have the luck of remembering the few things we´ve taught them; that maybe they´ll learn English faster because we taught them the basics, and get a wonderful job in international politics.

By the time I leave Honduras, I´ll have said goodbye to nearly 200 children. I´ll have said goodbye to seven beautiful families. I´ll have said ¨bueno suerte¨ to them all.

A community effort

A group photo after cleaning up the trash in the streets of San Isidro.

The curiosity of children is contagious, but it seems to die with age.

In San Isidro, when one child appears with a plastic bag and a purpose, surely about fifteen others will follow. It´s a sense of community that only children are capable of.

Last Friday, we organized a small trash-pick-up activity along the streets of the town to teach the children about littering and to clean up about three years of potato chip bags and candy wrappers trapped in gullies, sewers, and pot holes.

After putting up an announcement in the one store in town, three children showed up at 2:00 p.m. ready to get messy. Within ten minutes, the rest of the town´s children came to see what all the fuss was about. Soon after, twenty children were scouring the dirt roads and grassy banks of San Isidro with plastic bags overflowing with trash and hands caked with dirt.  In just thirty minutes they collected 14 trash bags worth of litter, litter that these same children had contributed to, and they admitted it.

Looking at all that trash made me sick, because I knew it would only enter the atmosphere as methane, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide.

Four days later, two children stood outside our property with shovels in hand, ready to dig a grave for the trash.  We´d invited them to demonstrate a more environmentally-friendly alternative to burning every scrap of trash and polluting the blue, mountain skies.

As we began to dig, curiosity served us well. By the time we were ready to bury the trash, about 7 shovels and 14 children taking turns with them were covered in dirt, singing Enrique Iglesias, and learning something new.

But we were slow. Eight year olds aren´t exactly the best at using a pick-axe, and ten year olds are a little weak when it comes to picking up a shovel-full of dirt.

Yet that day, a group of children working together, learning together, laughing together,  drew the rare curiosity of an adult. Busy with her eight-month-old baby boy, her corn fields, her five other children, and her jelly-making business, the last thing Lupe needed to do was come up to the house in her pretty green skirt and black heels and take up the pick-axe. But she did.

She broke more rock than 14 children and three gringos put together, the muscles in her arms straining, her black hair glistening with sweat on her temple.  We applauded her when the hole was deep enough, and she watched with a smile on her face as the children, two of whom were hers, jumped into the pit, dancing to compact the trash. She looked on as we covered it with soil, and as the children thought to plant a make-shift wooden cross and put white flowers on the grave of our community litter.

We always hope that the activities we do with the children will be passed onto their parents at the dinner table, but to have adults and children working together is the best way to get anything done, to learn, and to enjoy ourselves as a community, as a family.

As we were washing our hands, a few of the children ran off to climb a mango tree, and it began raining mangos. We sat around sucking the sweet, yellow flesh off the pits, chatting about what we learned, boasting together of our successful community effort, feeling closer than ever.

Organizing campesinos

An example of a well-organized group of farmers

Paola, Marvin, y Nathaniel helping to plant the potato investagation.

Machismo is a term to describe the Latino culture of patriarchal societies. Women are meant to be in the kitchen, looking after the kids, and doing whatever their husband asks them without raising their voice.

The only problem is, Latina women tend to be a bit too feisty for this role, and as education slowly permeates the lower classes of América Latina, machismo is beginning to lose some of its validity.

——————–

It´s a Wednesday after noon, and the mountain air has turned frigid as the clock strikes three: it´s time for the daily downpour. We´ve only just arrived at Gladis´s house, a small mud hut along the road to San Cristóbal, a tiny town in a high, mountain valley about 50 minutes away from San Isidro.

Paola and I, one of the directors of the NGO, sit outside the hut, inhaling the wood smoke from the fagón where Gladis has frijoles and arroz boiling away. The rain comes slowly, but soon we´re all inside the kitchen, an 8 foot by 10 foot room of earthen walls and earthen floors, an earthen stove with wood crackling away, two benches along opposite walls, and a tin roof that´s leaking in about twelve different places.

Gabriel, Gladis´s 18 month old, is shivering almost as much as I am, but he´s more accustomed than I am to being cold all the time. His mother is a 20-year-old with a beautiful smile and too many crows´ feet for her age. Her five year old daughter Jocyln hides under the bench, smiling up at me every few minutes to see if I´ll give her the awaited smile in return.

Finally, one hour after the meeting was supposed to commence, about six men come in from the rain, sopping wet and looking begrudged for having to come at all. ¨We´ve been waiting here for one hour.¨ Paola said. ¨We would be half way through the meeting right now if you had come on time.¨ I look at her with astonishment in my eyes. She´s a relatively young woman, married, with no children, and a college-educated career. She´s already going against many local norms without having to be so blunt with a group of proud campesinos. The glass ceiling is breaking.

The purpose of the meeting is to discuss organized activities in a group of campesinos from San Cristóbal. What kind of investigations can they begin that will help them diversify their harvest, their nutrition, their profit? What kind of personal finance lessons would they like Paola to teach them in the coming months? What kind of debt does the group have as a whole? Are they still using chemical fertilizers, and why?

The group has already planted an investigative cultivation of potatoes, and the next step is to clean the field again and fumigate. Otherwise, the potatoes will die and all their investments and work will have been for naught. But no one wants to go clean or fumigate.

¨If you had a girlfriend, would you leave her for two months without calling and expect to come back and see the relationship flourishing?¨Paola asks, appealing to their machismo sides.

No, the men respond in unison.

¨Well, potatoes need the same love as girlfriends. You can´t just abandon them and expect everything to be okay. And if you don´t do your part, you´re not going to reap the rewards of everyone else. They´ll have more potatoes for dinner, more money, knowledge about how to grow better and more potatoes, and you won´t.¨ The men nod their heads, but some look disgruntled and unconvinced. Why is this woman telling us what to do? Some seem to be thinking.

Paola continues unabashed. ¨I don´t care if it´s part of our culture to be late, or to be poor, or to be lazy. Those are the bad parts of our culture, and we can change them. Your first responsibility, forget the potatoes, is to be on time for meetings. I don´t care what you´re doing at 3 o´clock, you made a commitment to be here, and we´ve all been waiting and we could be doing better things with our time. And it´s not an excuse to say ¨I´m poor and nothing´s gonna change cause I´m poor.¨

¨We´re not poor. We have land. Land makes us rich. You can do more with your land than just plant beans and corn. You can plant more and give your kids a better diet, sell more and buy your kids better clothes. But if you don´t come to these meetings, and if you don´t go fumigate those potatoes, you´re losing an opportunity to make your land rich.¨

Three men signed up to clean and fumigate the fields.

Hopefully, Gabriel and Jocyln will be eating potatoes soon.

Come on In

Sorry Southerners, but you´ve officially been beat in the arena of hospitality.

After all the abuses the United States put Honduran campesinos through during the contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, it´s a wonder that a gringo can´t escape a campesino house without a cup of coffee, a meal, or a carnival ride on their steed.

 No matter the limited goods for sale in these mountain towns, the often poor harvests, the bedrooms full of too many children to fit in the one bed, the families of poor campesinos have given me the treatment of a foreign princess among royalty.

In Las Quebraditas, which is a good 45 minute drive from San Isidro through mountainous passes overflowing with coffee plants, the family of Doña Luisa awaits us every Wednesday morning.

 Living in the house directly below the school and home to the teacher, Doña Luisa will not allow me to teach until she has given me a cup of coffee and her freshly-baked corn bread from the outdoor earthen oven. I always go to class more than ready to take on the challenges of 6 grades in one room.

 After teaching, the men of the house will work in the yard, hacking away at dried bean pods to reveal the frijoles, squeezing sugar cane, making organic fertilizer, whatever the day´s work may involve. I´ll sit inside the kitchen, sipping a hot cup of coffee, or cocoa with maiz, cinnamon, sugar and milk, eating freshly-made tortillas, the family´s very own home-grown beans, and hot rice: I never asked for lunch.

 Before we leave, I´ll sit for a moment with Doña Luisa´s six month-old granddaughter on my lap, singing her Spanish songs before we have to leave and go back down the mountain to San Isidro.

 After Las Quebraditas, I come home to my second home. Doña Hilda is my second mother, my Honduran mother, my confidante, my personal chef, my guidance counselor, my eventual child´s godmother. Every evening, Doña Hilda cooks us a dinner of fried plantains, so soft and ripe that you don’t need your teeth to chew them, red beans that have boiled on her outdoor stove all day long, freshly-made corn tortillas, freshly-made cheese, half an avocado, and tomato-scrambled eggs. I always stay to gossip for at least 15 minutes after dinner, because my stomach is too full to walk.

 Yes, we pay Doña Hilda. But what she doesn´t charge for is her advice, her deep, rich laugh, her confiding conversation, her soft hugs that wrap you in over-worked arms, her grandchildren´s games and smiles, her dogs´ licks, the ginger that she brings you directly out of her backyard when you have a cough, or her homemade pan dulce (dessert bread) that she sticks on the side of your 10 a.m. cup of coffee.

 Just yesterday, I was walking home from Las Quebradas, our very own waterfall and swimming hole five minutes from our house, when I was stopped by Guadalupe, a local woman who owns a large swath of land up by the river.

 ¨Rebeca!¨She calls to me. ¨You haven´t seen my house yet! Come in,c ome in!¨I was sopping wet and in the middle of racing a few kids home, but I halt and turn for a small, white adobe house sitting amongst fields of corn, beans, plantains, and a yard where a horse, donkey, and two pigs are grazing.

 Lupe has her 8 month old, Junior, clinging to her chest, her breast nonchalantly exposed as always. ´What?´ She seems to ask. ´You didn´t realize these are for feeding my kids?´I stroke Junior´s hand, give Lupe a kiss on the cheek, and she leads me through rows and rows of vegetables, wild growing fruit trees, cucumber bushes, lemon trees, mango trees.

She picks up a ripe piece of fruit or a ripe vegetable whenever we see one, handing them to me as unspoken gifts. She rips a few strands of lemon grass out of the ground, folds them up and hands them to her 9-year-old daughter, Maria Isabel, telling her to go make some tea.

 When we return to the house, I have a cup of hot, sweet, lemon grass tea warming my hands. Lupe´s husband, Juan, is smiling toothlessly, telling me about his work in the corn mill.

I ask about his horse, simply inquiring its name and how old it is—if it´s friendly.

 ¨You want to ride it?¨He asks, eyes wide and inviting.

 ¨Uh, yeah, someday. Thank you.¨ I say, turning back to my tea.

 ¨No, right now. You want to ride it right now?¨ Before I answer, he´s already sent his 11 year-old son, Kerlin, to put a bit in the horse´s mouth.

 ¨Where´s the seat?¨ I ask, exchanging my tea cup for the ropes.

 ¨Ah, you don´t need one. You´ll just trot around the yard. ¨ Juan smiles and breaks into a soft chuckle.

 I climb atop Catimor and begin to trot. Kerlin instructs me how to use the rope to not only steer, but also whip the horse´s rump on both sides so that it will go forward. It starts a slow trot, then a bit of a canter, and we´re around the other side of the house as the family is laughing and cheering me on.

 ¨You can come and ride anytime. Take a journey for all I care.¨ Juan says as I take my leave with my bag of fruit and vegetables.

 Sorry, southerners. But I think even you realize you´ve been beat.

Queen of the world

They stand outside the metal gate to the school grounds, waiting patiently for me to approach with the keys. The boys, more comfortable atop a horse with a sombrero perched nonchalantly on their heads, stand awkwardly in blue pants and just-pressed white-collared shirts, and the girls, preferring to run and sit on the ground, stand demurely in their blue knee-length skirts. As I approach I´m greeted with 30 different shouts of ¨Buenos días.¨

They line up eagerly, bumping into each other as they attempt to be organized, and we enter the classroom where they then sit, organized by grade, and take out their pencils and notebooks without being told.

Thirty pairs of eyes are staring up at me, expecting five hours of education, and I don´t even have a college degree. But five hours later, they´ve learned more than they would without me, if not something completely different, and I feel as though my training doesn´t matter—we all have something to teach.

When school is over, four older kids come to the NGO office to learn computers. I teach them what we would consider the basics: how to turn on the computer, how to use a mouse, how to click ¨start.¨ As we learn how to operate Microsoft Office Word, I explain that if they memorize the name of that program as well as the basic functions, they´re more likely to get a decent job in the city.

At the end of the day, I realize that I haven´t done anything special. I´ve merely taken my time to share my knowledge with a group of children.

Four years ago, I sat with my 11^th grade English teacher and told him that I was frustrated with the world, that I wanted a career with enough power to really change the world´s oppressive systems.  

¨So basically, you´re telling me you want to be Queen of the world?¨ He said, smiling indulgently.

I was upset, because I thought that somehow, I could do something big. At the time, I wasn´t really listening to him: I thought that teaching was boring, or too small a feat, or too concentrated.

But he gave me a key that day that I only just recently used.

¨Each one teach one,¨ he said. ¨That´s the only way to change anything.¨

I´m not a teacher, and I don´t ever plan to have my own classroom. But I am teaching, and no matter what career I ultimately pursue, I´ll always teach.

The workers in this NGO are agronomists, but they´re more than that: they´re teachers. They teach the knowledge they themselves have garnered: how to maintain biodiversity, how to increase crop yield naturally, how to farm organically, how to organize, how to save money.

I´ve only been on this earth twenty years, but I can teach something, too. We all can.

When I see a child learning something that they likely wouldn’t learn without me, something that can improve their future, I realize that ¨each one teach one,¨means everything.

I feel like the Queen of the world.

More than just a curfew

The ¨toque de queda¨ is a military term. When this term is in use, the people know that whatever the President says goes, no questions asked.

It´s illegal to go out into the streets between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m, and that´s just fine as most people sleep between those hours. But what most people haven´t been told is that the toque also means that between 10 p.m. and 6 p.m. all constitutional rights are suspended

Even in the sleepy town of San Isidro, the military can knock down your door between 10 and 6 and arrest you for supposed subversive activity and hold you indefinitely without a right to a lawyer.

As Honduras hovers in a state of international condemnation and internal dispute, the current ¨President¨ has decided that the only way to assert his power is to implement martial law.

And supporters of Zelaya are furious. Teachers and other niche workers are on strike until he returns, which could be never, meaning that classes have been indefinitely cancelled.

Here in San Isidro, the children are going to the fields with their fathers and helping around the house while school is indefinitely out. But as three gringos are unlikely to demand a raise from the current government in the form of violent street protests against the golpe, we´re allowed to unlock the school doors and hold classes ourselves—but we can´t do that for every school in the country.

The golpe affects the lives of everyday people here so much more than CNN can really describe. While two self-entitled politicians fight tooth and nail for control of Latin America´s poorest country, the consequences are more severe than a few cans of tear gas in the streets of Tegucigalpa.

Most people in the formal job sector aren´t working, children who can barely afford an education are being denied it, and NGOs are trembling in their shoes as they try to prepare for a suspension of international aid.

If the negotiations between the two political factions don´t succeed and Michelletti remains President, international aid will be cut off indefinitely. Consequently, the NGO with which I´m volunteering this summer will lose its funding, thus hemorrhaging hundreds of jobs and suspending the work that helps thousands of Honduran campesinos feed their families and educate their children.

Daysie, a 25 year-old mother of three, goes to free classes facilitated by my NGO for agricultural workers who didn´t complete primary school. She sacrifices time in the field and time with her children in order to learn, bringing to class her almost 2 year-old son, Omar, whom she nurses in one arm while taking notes with the other.

If this NGO loses its funding, deserving people like Daysie will lose their right to an education, campesinos will lose the opportunity to learn about new and better seed varieties to improve their profitability and their families´ nutrition, and the forests of Honduras will lose a strong advocate for organic biodiversity and reforestation.

As the people shut their doors at ten p.m., they complain quietly amongst themselves.

¨No es justo¨or ¨it´s not fair,¨they say. But at the end of a tired argument, ¨asi es la vida¨ or ¨that´s just life,¨are their final words.

A toque de queda is more than just a curfew.

Wishing, and hoping, and thinking, and waiting…

Life is still calm here in Yorito as the news becomes clearer and clearer that what we thought was a coup indeed was not.

¨Remember Richard Nixon, 1974?¨Asked Don Alonzo, a staffer at my NGO. ¨He was arrested and impeached for breaking the law at Watergate. That´s all that´s happened here. Zelaya broke the law, so he was arrested.¨

Nevertheless, the military arrest of a democratically-elected president continues to look suspicious to us Gringos who are hesitant to travel back to San Isidro, just as it looks suspecious to those who lived through the coups characteristic of Cold War Latin America.

I tried to explain to Don Alonzo how it looks to Americans when a president is exiled in his pajamas by soldiers with AK-47s: about as unconstitutional as that president´s own move to hold a referendum without congress´s consent.

As Zelaya expects to return before Saturday, we´re all hoping that the streets remain calm. As important as the Constitution and the rule of law is, I can´t help but think how inconvenient this all is for the people who really matter in a developing country: the children.

As we´re holed up in Yorito eating chocolate-covered bananas, the work I committed myself to in helping educate these children is left undone, and I can´t help but think how selfish the Chavismo movement really is.

A true leftist who cares about his people wouldn´t risk a power grab of this measure. Rather, Zelaya would have actually spent the last five years of his presidency building highways and funding school buses and a school-feeding program, raising the minimum wage, protecting the diminishing Honduran forests, and finishing the land redistribution program that started in 1954 and has yet to be completed.

But for now we can only hope that the right people learn the right lessons from this incredible mess.

A Bloodless Coup

Yorito will still have its Saint´s Day festival…even if the military junta has put the entire country under curfew.

After reading the all too recent histories of los desaparecidos in the Southern Cone and about the murders of students and nuns in Central America during and after the coups of the Cold War, I never would have imagined that a military junta would find it worthwhile to give a small town like Yorito permission to continue its festivities of San Pedro day and the traditional coronation ceremony of its king and queen.

Yet four hours from the capital, there is no sign that President Zelaya was deposed yesterday by a military arrest and that Chávez is threatening an invasion if he isn´t re-imposed immediately.

The new queen was crowned without delay, the women continued to sell their tortillas and frijoles, and the children´s main concern was whether or not they would get a chance to dance with the Gringas at the coronation fiesta.

As the capital experiences mild violence and Zelaya sits in exile in Costa Rica, many Hondurans have yet to realize that their country is on the front pages of the world´s newspapers.

Claudia, a girl of 19 who is part of one of the youth farming groups in Yorito, merely shrugged her shoulders when we told her of the coup;  she had yet to find out.

Marta Lidia, a mother of three and an artisan whose house collapsed in the May earthquake and has yet to be rebuilt with government funds, said that Zelaya´s leftist politics had done nothing for starving people like herself, and so it didn´t matter to her that the coup had taken place.

Tomorrow, when we go to teach English in a community that´s a bus ride and a hike away from Yorito, we hope to have a ¨charla¨or ¨chat¨ with the youth group about the importance of democracy.

If young voters could care less whether a democratically-elected President is deposed by military force, it´s no wonder that the coup was bloodless, that violence has been contained, and that San Pedro day is a priority.

An ignorant citizenry equals a bloodless coup.

The Latin American Dream

Breathing in the mountains of Honduras is like breathing pure life. Each breath carries with it a new smell of damp earth, green leaves, growing roots, and the coming rain.

“Is the U.S. really beautiful?” Nine-year old Escarlet asks me, making a design with her fingers in the moist soil.

I pause and look around me. All I can see for miles are green hills, purple shadows of distant mountains, blue skies, and adobe houses so small and spread apart that they add to rather than detract from the scenery. Two yards beneath us, corn is on the cusp of shooting up out of the ground as six older women, including Escarlet´s grandmother, plant a new round of organic seeds for an experiment aimed at increasing their yield.

¨You have to really search to find beauty in the U.S.¨ I tell her.

 

I struggled to explain what an overbuilt strip mall looks like with parking lots stretching as far as the eye can see; what a subdivision with identical houses and yards lacking anything but unnaturally green grass can do to your ability to enjoy the aesthetics of your own country.

 

But Escarlet´s mother lives in New York. She left when Escarlet was only three, and her father still lives nearby in Vallecillo, only with another family.

I can imagine, then, that it wouldn´t matter quite so much how beautiful the Honduran mountains are, how close-knit the communities, if your mother is far away living what you can only hope is the American Dream.

In the United States, the 12 million illegal Hispanic immigrants and countless legal Latinos are barely living that dream, and I would struggle to defend the assessment that life in the U.S. is all that much better for an immigrant than life in rural Honduras.

Yet those left behind continue to dream. They ask about the skyscrapers. They ask about the people. Are they all white? Do they all speak English? Does everyone have their own car? Everyone has lots of money, right?

For those millions of immigrants, the questions their counterparts ask would be close to laughable, yet more and more Hispanics are leaving home to seek that illusive dream.

And Escarlet isn´t alone. Almost every person I have met here has at least one family member living in the United States, and just as their loved ones dreamt of crossing the border to a better life in “El Norte,” their mothers, wives, and children dream of their equally unlikely return.

The father of my neighbor´s two grandchildren left when his son was 2 months old and his daughter had yet to develop a heart beat in the womb of her mother. It doesn´t matter that Melvin Alexander and Darlene Gisele are two of the most beautiful, eager, intelligent, and loving children that anyone has ever had the pleasure of meeting; it doesn´t matter because their father has a new wife and a new baby in the United States — a new baby dressed in clothes from Baby GAP.

On one side of the border, I work in ESL classes, trying to improve the lot of those who have already crossed the frontier. Yet on the other side of the border, I describe why the U.S. isn´t worth the journey, why there´s not enough room in the American Dream for every suffering family.

But there is room for development. There´s room for those who stay behind to work towards a Latin American Dream.

an inconvenient truth

One hour up a 60 degree mountain. Thirty minutes down. We had come to deliver an inconvenient truth. But unlike Al Gore, we didn´t discuss climate change whilst riding in a limousine, let alone hitchhiking on the back of a pickup truck.

Every  time my colleagues and I walk up the mountain from San Isidro to Vallecillo, stunned by the view of the surrounding mountains and blue-yellow skies masterfully lit by the sunrise, we mourn the fact that cars were ever invented in the first place.

The colegio, or high school, in Vallecillo has asked us to come and enhance their natural science classes by teaching seventh, eighth and ninth graders about deforestation, climate change, renewable energy, and conservation of biodiversity.

Today, after teaching three classes about global warming and its consequences, the children´s faces reminded me of how I felt the first time I had seen Al Gore´s movie and realized how incredibly difficult  the third world war would really be.

That´s how my colleague, Sarah, referred to climate change: ¨El tercer Guerra mundial.¨ As we approach this war on climate change, the most important step is to spread awareness. Before we marched into their morning classes today, the children in Vallecillo had never even heard of ¨cambio climático.¨

Yet as we explained climate change, to which Honduras is barely contributing while my country is guilty as charged, I felt more hopeful about the soldiers who will be fighting this third war. They were anxious about the facts they heard, not questioning the projected rise in sea level—the way some self-entitled, gas-guzzling Americans are prone to do.

As we asked them to write diary entries in the year 2050 to describe their lives and how their  every day experiences would have changed due to climate change, they weren´t hesitant to describe life without cars, where gasoline, coal, and natural gas are illegal if not unnecessary.

I´m starting to think that maybe, just maybe, the good guys will win this one.