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Crime and civility in Central America

Posted on January 30, 2008 by Staff

Robert Dickson

Our family’s Honduran holiday vacation was feeling like anything but a holiday.

Our bags had first been reported as late, then later, then stolen from the truck on which they had been sent from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba. “Hijacked” was the term used. And I had contracted the Honduran version of the two-step.

Now I was back at The Mall (that’s what everyone called it — just like here) in La Ceiba, sitting in the back of a van in search of a bank to convert my check from Taca Airlines for the stolen luggage from limpiras to dollars. And lest I forget, the driver spoke no English and my Spanish is pretty much limited to what it takes to order certain adult beverages.

My previous trip to The Mall had been the evening before when I was shopping for underwear and a bathing suit in a mob of post-Christmas sale-crazed Hondurans, Spanish versions of Walking in a Winter Wonderland and Jingle Bells filling the air.

One of the reasons I travel to places like Honduras is for strange cultural experiences. The Mall, however, looked and smelled like every other mall and was full of the same sorts of stores. This experience was just plain unpleasant.

So now I returned, only to find that the bank had closed at 2:00, and it was now 3:15. It was Saturday afternoon and the parking lot was near gridlock.

Our driver was attempting to extract us from this mess when an elderly lady backed into his brand new van. Both drivers emerged and the expected arguing and arm-waving ensued. I sunk down into my seat as my two-stepped stomach kicked it up into a rhumba.

Then things really got weird.

After the argument came to a quicker-than-anticipated conclusion, our guy, who’d I guess was 25 to 30 years old, backed up and let the lady who smacked him back out. We followed her as she led us on a circuitous trip through the streets of La Ceiba. It turned out she was leading us to another branch of the bank so we could hopefully exchange our checks.

The bank branch was only a drive-through that wasn’t about to perform a complicated financial transaction, so I figured we’d soon be delivered back to the lodge where I could ease my gastronomical problems with a cold cerveza. Wrong.

As we pulled up to a house not far from the bank, our now-familiar lady emerged, cane in hand, and proceeded to get into the front seat of the van.

Turns out she spoke very passable English, having lived in Miami for a long time while working as an airline stewardess. She said she knew the young man’s employer and that he “wasn’t very nice.”

So we were all off to the body shop to see what could be done to keep the bad boss from coming down on our young driver for damaging his new van.

Soon I found myself standing in the dirt driveway of a La Ceiba body shop. It could have been a back lot in Carrboro except for the incredible bright-orange flowering tree (where’s Ken Moore when you need him?) and the fact that it was maybe 850 F on December 29th.

The damaged bumper wasn’t hurt much at all; really, barely a scratch. But the young Honduran driver was obviously intent on his eagle-eyed boss not being able to tell that anything at all had happened.

So the bumper was rubbed and polished, the lady paid the body-shop man and we all rode off into the heat of the afternoon, chatting away as if we were the best of friends.

As we returned our new friend to her home, she insisted that we come to her house Monday morning so she could escort us to the bank. She said that while the lines were always long, she was allowed to go to the front because of her age.

We explained that our schedules wouldn’t allow us to do this, so we’d just take our Honduran checks home with us and let our bank sort it out. She seemed a bit disappointed, but I really wasn’t sorry to have to miss another trip to the bank.

As we parted, our driver and the lady kissed each other in that way that so many cultures enjoy but that we norte americanos seem to find overly familiar. I just watched and tried to imagine such civility as two folks involved in an accident at our local version of The Mall kissing each other.

When we were delivered back to our digs, the young man refused to take any more than the agreed-upon price, even though most of the afternoon’s excitement was due to our need to find a bank.

He looked sheepish when I stuck a tip in his hand but laughed out loud when I used sign language to indicate he should spread some dust on the freshly polished bumper so it would match. He was laughing as he drove away.

Lost luggage proved no match for an experience with a higher order of civility. My stomach and I both felt lots better about our Honduran holiday, and cold beer never tasted finer.

Robert Dickson is the publisher of The Carrboro Citizen.

1 thought on “Crime and civility in Central America”

  1. Jennifer says:
    January 31, 2008 at 10:19 am

    Glad to hear you saw some positive in the “cultural experience” you were looking for. Many foreigners come looking for something quaint, rather than “cultural experience”. The truth is, if you LIVE in a foreign land, you speak a foreign language, and I am amazed at the number of people who expect to travel and have others speak their language. Had you spent any time really looking for culture, you would have ended up at the market, not the mall, which is where people who want an escape from the reality of living in a different culture go. Foreigners think of getting somewhere on time first, possessions and money all thrown somewhere in there. Hondurans think of family and friends first, and enjoying the daily journey of life, and who it may bring you way.

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