Honduras: Friendships on the Fringe
By Ben Keene

Clucking nervously, the chickens loitering in the road scattered as I crossed from my sleeping quarters to the main house for the evening meal. Brief though it was, my cold shower had refreshed me; and I looked forward to the nightly card game that followed our communal dinner. The screen door slammed behind me.

“Buenas tardes, Marcela,” I called to my friend across the kitchen.

I would have paused on the threshold to say something more, but my stomach interrupted with a growl. After an afternoon of sifting through dusty soil, the rich smell of beans bubbling on the stove had limited my ability to converse freely. I opened the small refrigerator, scanning its shelves for a cold drink to distract me until dinner. Only two days had passed since a bumpy pickup truck ride ended in Pueblo Nuevo’s plaza; but I was already beginning to feel at home here.  Mealtime happened like clockwork; I could now determine with some accuracy when the only telephone in town would be available; and most importantly, I knew my way to the local soccer field. 

Shortly after my arrival in this Honduran town, Marcela had led the way, a bag of new balls and bright orange plastic cones bouncing against her shoulder as she walked. Winding our way between concrete and adobe houses, where mothers and young daughters watched us from doorways, Marcela explained that she had decided to provide some structure to the afternoon matches; but she needed some help.  Fortunately I was slightly more knowledgeable about the rules of soccer than anyone else in our archaeological field school, and already quite familiar with the practice of graciously accepting defeat at the hands of gifted young athletes. In other words, I made for a qualified assistant coach.

“They look pretty good,” I observed as the field came into view, hoping to sound confident.

“Come on, help me divide them into teams,” she replied approaching the group of boys at the opposite end of the dusty expanse.

Hesitating to catch up with her, I looked around our makeshift stadium. On the far sideline a cow grazed on the few clumps of weeds still clinging to the topsoil, apparently unconcerned about our pre-game activities. A sold-out crowd seemed unlikely to materialize in the next few minutes.

I eyeballed the competitors. They ranged in age from about seven to their early teens.  Not a single one of them wore a jersey, and shin guards were out of the question. Several kids were barefoot. We split them into two groups and then established boundaries with the cones—imaginary lines that quickly proved ineffectual. After the first kick-off winning possession became the paramount pursuit, even if that meant dribbling out of bounds into the ditch to avoid losing possession of the ball.

During the course of sharing the field with the boys as I did in the afternoons that followed, my thoughts were often divided between the little-known past of the people who had lived here in the Cacaulapa river valley so many centuries ago and the futures of the current generation—the ancestors of the people who 500 years ago build the huge complex nearby known as El Coyote.

Every morning our field school would collectively rise, dress in the previous day’s dirty clothes, and slowly walk to our excavation site in the hills outside of town. The two archaeologists leading the dig had assigned each of us a square test pit where we spent our time gradually removing large bucketfuls of dry earth, pressing clumps of hard soil through our screens, and silently hoping our patch of ground contained a handful of artifacts, a fragment of bone, the trace of a structure.  A pair of men from Pueblo Nuevo, brothers, fathers, uncles, or cousins of the boys that would embarrass me daily on the soccer field, worked tirelessly alongside every student, often doing more of the shoveling then their twenty-something supervisors.

Page 1 of 2  Next Page

All contents copyright ©2006 Pology Magazine. Unauthorized use of any content is strictly prohibited.