I get off the bus near the Mormon temple, and start walking. I have an address in Col. Sitraterco I found earlier in an old ClarisWorks spreadsheet document from 1997 that I couldn't get to open properly in any program I have now, so it didn't correspond with a name. But I have my fingers crossed that it's the right one. So I walk forward two blocks, left a block, right, left, trying to feel my way around a grid I used to know so well. I come up against the river where I didn't remember one being, but notice that the house numbers are getting closer to the one I might be looking for. It's only an hour or two before dark, and I'm lugging the kitchen sink around not knowing where I'm going.

I walked up a street only about ten numbers away from the one that I had, but it looked right. I remembered the house's position on the block (second in) and its shape, and I thought I saw the one. I rattled the door and shouted for Doña [can't remember pseudonym. I'll call her…] Eulalia. A young woman peered through the window. "Who are you looking for?" she asked. I asked if Doña Eulalia lived here. It had been a while, but she had lived here, I thought. No, she said, no Doña Eulalia lived there. I said, she's Rebeca's mom, and the house looks just like this one. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "it's on that block," pointing one block down. "It's the house with two floors." I tell her that that can't be; it only has one floor. But she says they just recently built the second floor. I thank her and walk down the street, not fully believing it. But at the gate, I see Doña Eulalia and her skinny background husband (Rebeca's father) whose name in all these years no one has ever told me and it hasn't seemed to matter, sitting at a table absorbed in a game of poker. This was it. They both looked exactly the same as they had five years earlier. "Doña Eulalia," I called. She replied "Pase" without really looking at me. I walked right up to her and said hello and only then did she realize it was me. "Qué milagro!" she exclaimed, never for a moment slowing down her poker game. She tells me Dulce Cristina was inside, so I walked towards the door and saw her. She was older, curvier, and seemed so much more mature. I couldn't believe how much she'd changed since the first time I met her (she was 13 then). She introduced me to her husband, a wonderfully sweet, big doting teddy bear of a young man, and their baby, her second. Her first was now, dios mío, seven or eight years old. Dulce had had her after a fling with a young man who was in Lima for an evangelical reunion of some sort that she was attending when she was 16. I'll refrain here, I'll refrain.

So her husband, whom I'll call Samuel, and she sat with me in the living room which now, rather than the ratty threadbare couch and rickety chairs I remembered had two large comfy leather (or at least pleather) couches facing a television that I could have comfortably slept inside, were it hollow. It took up a whole wall. They started to fill me in on things.

• Their father Omar died one year earlier in March, but they had never really seen him again after their mother and his separation. He died of lung cancer. He must have been in his mid-forties.
• Dulce went to Dallas for six months last year. I calculated that she had actually been there when I was there to testify in an asylum case.
• Dulce thinks I still am primarily interested in maquiladoras (a relic from the first summer I was there when I must have talked about little else), so she tells me early on about how they are these days. "You know that they only let people work there for two months [una temporada] and if they want to work more they have to sleep with the boss." She worked in maquilas for a while some years back, but had some bad problems with sexual harrassment.
• To go to the states, it took Dulce only 8 or 9 days, whereas Samuel took 28. She crossed the Río Grande in a boat. For three people including her it cost fourteen thousand dollars. Her aunt sent for her.
• Samuel tells me he and Dulce Cristina's younger brother Omar worked in many places during the year and a half that he was there with (formerly Omarito, which differentiated him from his dad Omar), including New Orleans.
• Dulce and Samuel have been together for five years, but only got married on Saturday—two days earlier!
• Sindi called Samuel papá, and he treated her with love.
• Dulce asks after all my gringa friends who I've brought along at different points.
• Dulce tells me that Vanesa earns L.2000 a week ("which is only something like one hundred dollars"), for 12 hours a day five days a week. It's certainly above the national average, and a thousand whole lempiras above the canasta básica, the basic cost of living. "Les interesa la explotación," she says.
• "Yo creo que Adriana es la única gringa que habla bien el español. Yo me acuerdo que esa Sara siempre decía 'ni papas' y se reía."
• Me: "Me alegra que les va bien." I'm happy things are going well for you.
  Dulce Cristina: "No siempre nos ha ido bien. Se acuerda de aquellos tiempos?" "It hasn't always gone well for us. Do you remember those times?"
• Dulce promised to never again leave her daughter behind. That was the most painful part of being in the states. "Ya exploramos las tierras esas y no me gustaron, ya no vuelvo." "Now we've explored those lands and I didn't like them. I won't go back."
• out of sequence, but later Doña Eulalia said something similar. "Ya no voy allí. Perdí la residencia. Estuve mas de un año aquí. Si ellos quieren verme que vengan. "I'm not going there again. I lost my residency. I've been here for more than a year. If they [her children and grandchildren living in Dallas] want to see me, they can come here."
• Dulce Cristina: "Trabajamos de meseras en un lugar que se llamaba Rancho Carbonero. Teníamos que usar faldas cortas y con ese montón de machos mexicanos que estaban ahí. Mejor olvidarme del lugar." "We worked as waitresses in a place called Rancho Carbonero. We had to us very short skirts and with all those Mexican machos there [said with great disdain]. It'd be better to just forget about the place." She said they never touched her inappropriately, thank God, but it was not uncommon.
• "Ya no hay maras. Casi los eradicaron." "There aren't gangs anymore. They practically eradicated them."
• "Ya no son maras. Son barras de equipo de football." "They're not gangs anymore. They're soccer fans."
• Pero igual sigue bien dificil la situación aquí, la situación económica. Es bien difícil encontrar un trabajo." "But [even without the gangs] the situation is still very difficult here, the economic situation. It's really hard to find a job."
• Samuel decides to call Rebeca and just tell her a friend is waiting; make it a surprise. He gets really into it. It's quite sweet.
• Sabrina built the upstairs addition for herself and her husband and their daughter (wow) and Vanesa who is asleep at the moment, lives in the room where I used to stay with her fiancé.
• Omar and Samuel got deported. It was a long, long story, Samuel told me.

Vanesa comes out of the room, just waking up for her night shift, 7:00pm-7:00am. Like Dulce, she's filled out some more and looks great. She's of course surprised to see me, and after making herself something quick to eat comes over and talks briefly. She tells me nothing ever came of their big lawsuit against Cheil after it skipped the country, leaving all its workers high and dry.

Rebeca and Sabrina come in. The first thing I notice is that Rebeca looks better than I've seen her since the first summer we met. She really looks well. She has a peace about her and seems relaxed, which makes her look years younger than the last time. I embrace her and tell her how happy I am to see her, and that she looks so much better, so much happier. She hugs me so tight and says "I know, Adriana, I know." Sabrina, for her part, looks fabulous too, although she's "fat" now, which means a little over my size. She had always been rail thin, but since having her daughter, she's pudged out. "Adriana, I weighed 140 pounds in December!" she exclaimed. "140 pounds! Can you believe it?!" Although she certainly has trimmed down, 140 pounds is hardly obese for someone about my height. Rebeca and Vanesa, who are both much larger, tease her about this ("Oh, yeah how fat! 140 pounds!"). Later, when I show pictures from my computer which I transfer to theirs [They have a computer! With an internet connection! And wireless! Omar has a bloody iPod! a couple years in the states did all this!], Vane's fiancé Roberto and Samuel see how skinny she was, and joke that if her husband saw her like that now, he would leave her. Skinny here, not as desireable as curvy.

We go into Rebeca's room which is now in the back corner, so we can use the air conditioning (?!). She lies on one bed and I on the other, and some of the girls and grandkids surround us, prying and playing. She tells me she was not well last year. She had to have two operations for something that sounds to me the way she describes it like ovarian cysts. She had all sorts of things removed. She did it in a private clinic, and the operations cost 27,000 lempiras and 15,000 lempiras (for a total of around USD$2, 225)

Sabrina comes and shows me her wedding album (back when she was still skinny, could I see how skinny she was?). So I show her my pics. They don't ooh and ah over Fhar—none of them are particularly into white guys—but they are really excited to see pictures of my mother and brother, and find the fact that none of it looks at all like a marriage amusing. I had asked Sabrina if she didn't get married in a church, trying to find out if she'd succumbed. "No!" she shouted, making the sign with her hand that in Honduras signifies a big stack of money. "Here to get married in the church is super expensive!" You didn't get married in the church, Adriana? I made a face. "Sabrina, you know I've never been religious." I immediately regret showing this disdain. Sabrina has, it turns out, become evangelical finally. I guess it was the critical mass. And Rebeca had announced at one point in the conversation that her dream is to go to the United States to visit the Iglesia de Dios in Miami. I guess it must be this one.

I ask Rebeca if she's working, since she always was slaving at two or three jobs in addition to her housework, or if she's just being a grandmother. She lies back on her bed, smiles, rolls over on her back and stretches. "Ahora no tengo que trabajar para mantenerlos a ellos, ahora ellos tienen que trabajar para mantenerme a mí." "Now I don't have to work to maintain them; they have to work to maintain me!"

I move around my right shoulder as I always do, trying to remove the permanent stress damage from my first year in grad school. Sabrina notices and says "You need a muscle relaxant!" and then to someone in the room, "Dale una oxy!" "Give her an oxycontin!" Wow, pharmaceutical controls here, not so tight. They were from a legitimate cause, at least, it turned out. Rebeca had a bunch left over from her surgery the previous year.

Sabrina tells me to try to get internet on my computer, but I say I don't think there's wireless here. I'm wrong. This is when they tell me about Omar's iPhone. He bought a big huge gold chain and then sold it here and bought an iPhone with the money.

Roberto came back from his job designing silkscreens in the same industrial processing zone where Vane works after she left for her night shift. He sat down at the kitchen table, where Rebeca had made me a huge meal of beans and rice and fried plantains and cheese and tortillas (of course) and a big slab of meat. Rebeca told me she was trying to fatten me up, and I promised it would work. Roberto tells me that now Vanesa's no longer an operaria but an auditora, a sort of inspector/overseer, and that le toca andar caminando toda la noche, she has to be walking around all night long. He met her there.

Rebeca and Roberto started discussing strategy for some big church event. They're discussing whom they should invite. He suggests a pastora. She says, gingerly, "Do we have to refer to her as pastora? Can we call her licenciada? Because in my church we don't have pastoras." I chime in and ask why women can't be pastors in her church (women evangelical pastors are not uncommon in Honduras). She answers,

"¿Cómo se lo explico? Mira, Adriana, en mi iglesia hay mujeres que hacen todo lo que hace un pastor. Yo por ejemplo tengo mis discípulas, pero estoy de coordinadora. Porque la palabra original es pastor, no pastora. Me explico?"

"How can I explain it? Look, Adriana, in my church there are women who do everything a pastor does. I, for example, have my disciples, but my title is coordinator. Because the original word is pastor, not pastora. Get it?"

I feel increasingly queasy about the Spanish translation of the book I'm trying to get published. I almost want to call it off, so they won't be hurt by my theoretical take on evangelical christianity in Honduras. They're all so very devout. Even tall, handsome young Omar, while surfing around on hi5, turns on evangelical devotional music and sings along with the whole album. When they ask me about it, I warn them that there's both the good and the bad about them in there; that's why I use pseudonyms. They seem okay with this. I don't know, though. I worry.

Their unbelievably cute cat, Cemita, makes me momentarily miss Cairo. She climbs all the way up a window screen to try to get at a gecko, but by the time I get my camera out and functioning, she's hunting from the top of a chair:

I get up around 5 and start typing. Around seven Rebeca straggles out of the room and turns on the massive television. She watches some evangelical show for a bit and then switches over to some horror movie about a little girl ghost who speaks through other little girls and causes the women who move into her house to miscarry. It's subtitled (I assume) because I'm hearing it in English, sounds Stephen King-ish.

Around 8am, Vane calls to tell Rebeca no hay transporte. There are no buses. Rebeca says she'll find a way to get to San Pedro and pick her up. I volunteer to go along, curious to find out why no hay transporte. Turns out the drivers are on strike so that the government will raise fares, their only source of income. They're "taking advantage" of the price hikes in gas, Rebeca tells me. On the way in in an SUV that either belongs to them or their young neighbor who remembers me (he drives), I see buses driving back and forth, which confuses me. "If there's a paro then why are the buses running?" I ask. They tell me they're not getting past the Lima-San Pedro toll booths; that's where the other bus drivers are blocking the passage of buses into the city. Individual cars can go through. But if buses try they'll be blocked, and if they still try, they'll be stoned, Rebeca tells me. We enter a long phase of stop and go traffic, rare on this wide open road, and indeed, I see no more buses going my direction.

I see white grafiti over an unpainted cement wall, which reads:
Tomás Nativí ¡Vive!
Abajo el precio de los combustibles

Rebeca says Tomás Nativí was "one of those revolutionaries in the 60s or something." He's actually Berta Oliva's husband, one of the early desaparecidos (1981) from Honduras. Doña Berta is the General Coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of Missing Prisoners in Honduras (COFADEH). "Siempre que hacen huelgas sacan esos nombres," Rebeca says. "Whenever they have strikes they drag these names out." On the car's sound system, a singer croons "el espíritu de Dios llena mi vida" in a rock ballad style.

Pictures, in order of appearance:
I start seeing parked buses:

On the other side of the street a bunch of guys excitedly run and jump into the back of a pickup truck that agrees to give them a lift:

Again on the other side of the street, lots of people who would be taking the bus, walking:

A group of maquiladora workers of the uniform-wearing variety going home from the night shift:

A little stand. I wonder if it's profiting from the vastly increased foot traffic:

Stopped in traffic. The guys in the street are cobradores. They're the ones who get out and hustle bus passengers by shouting the destination over and over again and herding passengers to the door, and who take people's money on the bus. As an aside, I've always been amazed at the visual recall they have in general, where they have to remember who'se already paid each time they collect anew.

I ask one if I can take their picture, since Rebeca had told me I should just take it, and he said it was fine:

Then they got a little silly about it and started acting for the camera:

Cops standing around on the other side of the street:

and again:

There were rows of parked cabs, too. Cabs don't have set fares, but they are pissed about the gas hikes and so these one at least are on strike, as my driver the other day had suggested.

more parked buses:

and on the other side of the tollbooth, a seemingly endless row of parked buses:

…and a bit further down:

further still:

And still it continued:

I had some serious qualms about whom to support here. I mean, I always admire collective resistance, but for fare hikes? That will hurt the poor the most. But then again, bus drivers can't make a living on old fares if the gas is so high. The other option then, as it's posed, is gas price decreases. But I don't want that either. We can't go on subsidizing this folly. The clear answer for me is government-subsidized alternative energy transport funded by progressive taxation. But nobody's talking about that. Imagine what the industrial park owners would say (capital would flee, we couldn't afford the taxes, blah blah blah). Meanwhile, their workers are walking kilometers and kilometers home in the heat after 12-14 hour night shifts, blaming the bus drivers.

We made it to the little gas station/mini-mart where Vane and four or five of her friends were waiting outside in the morning heat at a little table on the grass. Rebeca and I were starving so we went inside and got some food. All I could find that I dared to eat were some strange vegetable chips, rosquillas and water. She got a sandwich. Vane asked if we could drop off her coworkers, so they all piled in the rear part of the SUV and in the back seat with me and her. Since we were going so slow, I decided to take some pictures of La Prensa which Rebeca had bought from a newspaper boy back in the earlier traffic.

Cover: Mel's government continues losing popularity. Seeing this cover, Vane says "No sé si queriendo hacer el bien le salió mal al presidente o si definitívamente no le funciona el cerebro porque no le veo pinta de ladrón." "I don't know if he wanted to do the right thing and it just came out badly for him, or if his brain just doesn't work at all, because he doesn't strike me as a thief." Also on the cover, Today, national transit strike, a couple is killed in San Manuel (corpses in pic), Peasants, with no credit to get loans to plant their basic grains, Chortís take Copán demanding land titles, and Miss Honduras modeled (Dan says gallivanted would be a better word when I get stuck on desfiló) with an incomplete traje típico. Funny thing is, nothing could ever be típico about the gaudy contraption she has on, neither in the English nor the Spanish meaning of the word, and whether or not the dress were complete.

page 8:
CORPORATION The city is saturated and permits keep being solicited to install those signs. There are 25,000, between vallas y mupis legal and illegal
The proliferation of advertising billboards is worrysome

page 14: Buses on strike. The president threatens to declare a state of siege, as was recently done in Guatemala.

page 20: There won't be a reduction in wheat prices in Honduras (even though there has been a decrease in the price on the international market).

The same story is repeated in a different format on page 51:

page 24: The workers at the National Registry of Persons go on strike demanding a salary increase. "Tegucigalpa. Five months away from the [presidential] primary elections, the National Registry of Persons, RNP, has not been able to get the material needed to make 1.2 million ID cards [a bit confusing here, since sometimes Hondurans I know call 100,000 a millón, and a million mil millones which seems likely to be the case here], among which are 417 youths eligible to exercise the right to vote for the first time."

page 26: Assailants keep limeños on edge. Three buses from Catisa and Tupsa are assaulted each day. Businessmen say that the criminal acts will continue because of the lack of support from the SPS mayor's office and Police.

page 30: "Come on in!" Large door: "product entry" (with mean migration officer holding a club); small high window: "people entry."

an ad, somewhere around there. Vane says to me, "Does that seem good to you? To me it seems bad." This one says so much about the violence of the private insurance industry that I don't know where to begin. "Welcome, Hurricane!"

page 50: The decimocuatro, a special bonus Honduran workers get around this time of year, "went like water." 31.5% of respondents, the largest category, say they used their decimocuatro to pay off debts. After that were educational expenses (16.2%) and home supplies (14.4%). 55.3% say they won't save any of it.

We drop the guirras off in Rivera Hernandez, and on the way back the neighbor obliges me and slows down so I can take a picture of the throngs of people gathered around to receive free medical consultations from gringos. This is how corrupt states create religious fanatics.


[I was sure they said it was Rivera Hernandez, and it looked like it to me, but the church says Planeta, which confuses me. I wonder if I got the location wrong.]

For the rest of the way back to the main road, we followed this guy in a porter's suit and bowtie sitting on a pile of luggage in the cloth-covered bed of a little truck. I finally got close enough to take a pic, as we moved through the slow cop-filled crazy traffic jam at the intersection:

I didn't mean to get all those cops, and they saw me take the pic but luckily didn't get mad. I was just focused on this guy. I figured it was delayed airline luggage or something:

We then went to the airport where the neighbor got out to go to work and Vane took the wheel. Rebeca was mentioning to me that she didn't drive, and I told her I don't either. I explained how I quit driving two years ago after a fender bender and decided to go with biking and public transit after that, porque es más seguro (because it's safer). Vane set me straight. "Tal vez allá es más seguro tomar transporte pero aquí no. Aquí asaltan. Hay masacres en los buses, más que nada en los sectores pobres como Choloma." "Maybe there it's safer to take public transportation but not here. Here they assault you. There are massacres on the buses, especially in the poor areas like Choloma."

Back at the house I had a short amount of time to process a whole bunch of pics before going to the bus station. Dulce had called and said the bus to Tegus left at 11:30, and since it was going in the other direction and was a long distance bus, we figured it'd be okay. For some reason my camera was really screwing up. I just wanted to get two more days out of the darn thing. It wouldn't focus for these three pictures of Rebeca, Sabrina's two-year-old, and Dulce's 8-month-old

Sindi posed for me here, all grown up. She spent a lot of time brushing her hair, and wore a tiara around much of the time.

Outside, I took a couple pictures of Dulce Cristina and the girls. Also featured are some of the fridges, air conditioners and washing machines that Rebeca's brother sent back from the states for Rebeca to sell (she got to keep about L.1000, around USD$50 for each one she sells), and the traveling church podium she uses when she's being a coordinadora, not a pastora.

Inside, Samuel (who was home from his job in a silkscreening factory at Vane and Roberto's industrial park on a sick leave) and Sabrina's husband, Eric, who had been out of a job for two months ["Things are hard here," Dulce had said earlier when I asked what he did. "He's been looking, but…"] spent the morning watching the children and the t.v. They seemed to treat the kids collectively. Sometimes I'd look over and they'd be cradling each other's kids, sometimes their own.

Samuel and Rebeca drove me the short distance to the bus station downtown, where we discovered that the 11:30 bus had been canceled after all due to the transit strike. So I had a few more hours to process photos. I worked at lightning speed, and got through a whole bunch of them, but then kept having to take more (e.g., newspaper pics). 2:30 crept up so quickly. At 2:15 I was ready to go, but Dulce kept dallying, driving me crazy. For some reason she and her baby were coming along, and she was filling extra bottles of milk, just in case. I didn't know what I'd do if I missed the bus. They didn't seem concerned, so I stifled it. We left at 2:28, and it was raining so hard that in the 2-foot hop between the porch and the car, I got completely soaked. And again when I got out. The bus was in fact waiting, and didn't leave for another 15 minutes. I guess they'd known better. Before jumping out of the car I gave everyone cramped hugs and promised to come back in a year. I left so happy for them, but conflicted.

The bus, a "directo," was something of a nightmare. First of all, it did go through San Pedro. Luckily, the transit strike had ended earlier in the day, so there wasn't too much delay. The buses were all still parked past the tollbooth, but nobody seemed to be actively blocking traffic. On the way out of San Pedro by that toll booth, there were more stopped buses, and lots and lots of riot police with shields and full gear just standing around.

The bus turned out to be a gallinera, stopping at every little place along the way. Most enfuriating was to not be able to take out my laptop and do anything because it would be my own fault when it got stolen. I had been counting on stopping at a restaurant midway, because I was feeling nauseous from my inadequate breakfast of questionably deep-fried chips and rosquillas, which I've never liked anyway. But the bus was letting on so many food vendors that I was starting to think they were replacing our restaurant stop in Siguatepeque. The vendors had matching red polo shirts that said "Asociación de vendedores La Barca, Santa Cruz de Yojoa." The bus let them on at a stop, they'd ride for a while selling their stuff, and then get off at another stop and ride back in the opposite direction on another bus. Here are some outside the bus:

Another thing to note in this picture is the storefront painted with Tigo signs. Tigo is one of the big cell phone companies, the one I was using while there. And it looks like they're using the Pecsi tactic: provide storeowners exterior paint on the condition that their logo gets painted onto the exterior. Another such establishment was further down the road:

Anyway, since I thought maybe eating would help with my nausea and I didn't see much hope for a restaurant, I broke down and bought some tajadas, and since they were three for a dollar and I was too tired to divide, I got all three. And when they tasted like they had been deep fried in motor oil with pigskin, I decided to eat only two bags instead of all three. And soon I was at a level of nausea I've reached only a few times in my life. And then we did stop at a restaurant, after all. I hobbled to the little store in the back, alternately clutching my stomach and my head. "Do you have…medicine..for pain?" I whispered, and was handed some pills. They did little good. I figured still, I'd done well. A whole 19 days in Honduras without getting sick—that had been something of a record for me. So I tried to feel grateful.

While there was still light, I took a few more pictures from my window. This one shows signs of danger for pregnant women. My favorite graphic is the abundant bleeding one.

There were tuktuks. I was frustrated to not get a picture of the front of this one. It had a great face painted on it.

On a tight mountain corner a refrigerated unit had fallen on its side. There was a tow truck there, and traffic crawled along. We did a 2 minute span in half an hour. All told, the four-hour trip took six.

That night Suyapa and Elena are home when I get there around 9:00, which is a relief because I'd been calling and calling and thought no one would be around to let me in. We chatted for a while, and then I begged off to go to bed, hoping that sleep would do something for my condition.