2008 Honduras trip

This is an excert from the journal Tim kept during his mission trip to Honduras with Discovery Service Projects, based in Pipersville, Pa. The group traveled to rural villages to meet the people and participate in a project that will bring clean air and clean water to rural families.

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We’re staying in a Catholic retreat center called Las Milpas. It is like a hacienda, multiple rooms arranged around a central courtyard open to the sky. It’s very basic with only fluorescent lights, single cots, minimal bathrooms, no hot water—all the latest in self-denial.

Our work for the first two days was in two villages about ten miles from here. They are nestled right up against the base of the mountains, the valley floor behind reserved by wealthy land owners for sugar cane. There is a main highway, two lane, that runs the center of the valley and dirt roads lead off from it back to the fields, processing plants, and villages. The first village we traveled to is called Campo Allegri (Happy Farm) and has 53 homes. Most are made of block, some are stucco, others are just sticks and mud. Some have poured concrete floors, others just dirt floors. Most homes consist of one or two rooms and generally a separate kitchen a few steps away. A few miles up the roads is an even poorer village called Pimiento (pepper). Though I haven’t worked there yet, I’m told that the poverty is greater there than in Camp Allegri.

Our work has been to install very basic gravity water filters and improved Loreno stoves. The water filter is essentially a 25-gallon, tall plastic tub, in which we put in 4 layers of gravel and sand, each measured in exact proportions. We start with large gravel and work our way to fine sand. Nature does the work to clean the water. Each day the family is to put a minimum of 5 gallons in the top. Gravity pushes the clean water from the bottom, up to an outlet valve, where it is collected. It’s very simple technology but can cut out 80-90% of water-borne bacteria. Each one takes about 90 minutes to install.

The other project is building stoves. This is very dirty work. We use adobe bricks and mud mortar. The mortar is a combination of mud, ash, cow manure and “stickywater,” derived from bark of a local tree soaked for several days to extract the gum. The stoves take about 3 hours to build, and include a firebox, an oven, and  a metal cook top. Most of these are built into the corner of the kitchen, against mud or masonry walls and are vented out of the house thorough an aluminum stove pipe. The last thing to be finished is a rain hat on top of the stovepipe, and we usually send a small boy up on the tin to place the shield on.

The economy here is drive mostly by sugar and coffee. Landowners hold huge tracks of valley farmland, while the poor huddle along the main highways in small houses or right at the foot of the mountains. There are banana plantations owned by US and multinational corporations, but this area is dominated by sugar cane in the fields and coffee plants on the shady hillsides. To get to the villages where we have been working we had to drive through miles of cane fields, with cane growing about 12 feet high. We’re told that they harvest is late this year. When the time comes, the landowner will burn the fields, which removes the leaves, but spares the cane itself, which is then cut and processed. People can count on about six months of work in the cane fields and processing plant. In the off season the cultivate vegetables, grow coffee in small quantity, and do other work if they can find it.