Honduras: Returns From The Fields
By Ryan Crawford

We raised money and collected donations for the trip all year long. It was a process, and the payoff was getting to come here and do some good.  For some members of the group, this was their second, third, or even fourth time down here. They were already veterans of service in Central America, and even the newest of the newcomers spoke passable Spanish. They all had a leg up on me. I came to Honduras uninitiated with a Spanish lexicon that was gleaned from Sesame Street and Taco Bell commercials. I was anxious about how well I would be able to connect with people, the kids especially, given the language barrier.  Regardless of how it turned out, I was determined to bring something to the project, even if that was just an able body.  I was ready to build computer labs, dig septic tanks and tend fields.
 
When we first arrived at the fields, we were met by four or five Honduran kids already at work. We are volunteering at a school, and the kids range from ten to seventeen. The older kids usually work with machinery, while the first years pay their dues doing grunt labor in the fields. Sergio and Paula serve as ambassadors from our group and offer the kids extended greetings in Spanish; they are both fluent speakers. I grin stupidly, and say a self conscious “hola!”

The boys are all skinny and have their hair slicked back with some kind of product.  All of them are wearing blue jeans, and a lot of their shirts are donations. This is the land of American hand me downs. You see old t-shirts from U.S. colleges, and the celebratory shirts of losing super bowl teams, printed in advance, just in case. One boy has a short sleeve button down shirt that features an array of Marvel super heroes.

One of the boys, Rollington, is the leader of the group, he has big white teeth which we see when he frequently smiles. At about sixteen, he is the oldest. Through Sergio he tells us that they’re working on weeding at the moment, so we can help out with that.

I’d much rather be doing something more physically challenging. But I want to help, and I figure they know what they need done better than I do, so I squat in one of the shallow trenches between rows of crops and go to work taking my new job very seriously. I move like typewriter. A few yards away Sergio discovers a tarantula. It leaps into the air and skitters away in one direction just as Sergio jumps up and runs in the other. I weed a bit more cautiously after this. Sergio keeps encountering spiders every few minutes, but no one else sees any. He finds this unfathomable. The boys regard his complaints with amusement.

In truth the boys in the fields with us could probably do any farm related work in a fraction of the time it would take us. When they set out on a task, these kids are as persistent and competent as any workers I’ve ever seen. There are hard-working people in my volunteer group too, but we are all regularly put to shame by these kids. This is understandable. They have been doing hard manual labor their entire lives, while we’ve been living relatively comfortable existences back in the States. This doesn’t lessen the sting when a twelve year old kid shows you up at something.

They are hard workers, but not in the frantic, single minded way we often associate the term with in the states. At the moment the boys are far less concerned with weeding than we are. Maybe they appreciate the extra hands (however inept), maybe not. It’s hard to say. It takes me a while to realize they really just want to interact with us.

There is no rush in the fields. A boy in an adjacent patch of crops squeezes a piece of plastic between the blades of his thumbs and puts it to his mouth. He makes a sort of whistling kazoo noise that can be heard from far off.  Rollington asks about what music we like. There are two other boys who want to sing a song for us

At one point two boys occupy the center of the patch of crops as if it were a stage and launch into a rendition of a Spanish pop song. Unfortunately, most of us can't understand  the lyrics, but they are sung unabashedly, and I like that.

This is my introduction to the other side of volunteer work.  They are poor kids, but they are still just kids, curious about foreigners and eager to show us something about their lives.

Now they want us to a sing a song too. Rollington is adamant about it. Sergio shrugs and tells them we don’t know any. When Rollington realizes that we aren’t going to sing, he plots another way to derive entertainment from us. He calls us over to the side of the field with an easy wave and begins to chop down a stalk of sugar cane growing there. He talks, and Sergio translates. He explains to us that this is something we need to know how to do if we are going to work in the fields. He holds the stalk in front of him at a slight angle and makes smooth swift strokes with a machete along the sugar cane, flicking curling ribbons of the stalk aside and leaving only a white edible interior.

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