"Honduras, me dueles"
The one month recap of my family's big move to the country.
August 6 marks one month since my family and I drove into my parents’ childhood neighborhood in El Progreso, Honduras, ending the 7 days and 6 nights long road trip from our old apartment in Brooklyn, New York. With my parents’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS) not getting renewed because of the current administration, my mom still not fully recovering from breaking her leg last year, and the increasing threat of ICE abusing and detaining anyone who remotely looks brown and “an illegal”, they decided to leave the United States and rest in Honduras. As a family unit, we would tackle the journey and first few months there together. After those months, my brother and I plan to return to New York and adjust to life there without them. All of this has been an enormous shock to our collective system. For starters, my brother and I had never visited Honduras growing up; we were never comfortable going there without our parents, and they weren’t able to travel back because of the travel limitations of their TPS. As for my parents, they hadn’t been in Honduras in over 30 years, my dad having left in 1993 and my mom following suit in 1995. Besides, during those 30 years my family have become real New Yorkers™: Brooklyn neighborhoods like Prospect Place and Carroll Gardens being our specific stomping grounds. By the time we decided to move to Honduras, my parents had officially lived most of their lives in New York City. They never planned or expected to move back to Honduras.
It’s been an adjustment, to say the least. For my parents, so much has changed in their neighborhood and in the country. RTN identification numbers, the 500-lempira bill, and the obscene number of fast-food chains along the major roads didn’t exist by the time they left. The neighborhood they grew up in used to feel bigger and spaced out with wide streets. On the night of July 6, when we drove into the neighborhood, my parents were surprised that everything looked so small and messy now. They remarked on how narrow and rocky the streets were for driving, how the houses looked shabbier and close to toppling over one another. However, even with how different the neighborhood felt off the bat, they still managed to navigate to the house of my dad’s older brother, Jorge, relatively quickly. Upon arrival at Jorge’s, my mom’s side of the family came over and greeted us all warmly. My cousins, my mom’s older brothers, and her father all came to see us. Seeing my mom reach out to my grandfather and hug him for the first time in 30 years made the arduous 3,504-mile road trip worth it. I had never seen her so happy and relieved to see anyone that wasn’t me, my brother, or my father.
That first night we ate dinner at my cousin Yenny’s house, meeting her kids, their cousins, and catching everyone up to speed with how the trip went and our new living situation. My parents planned for us to stay at Jorge’s temporarily while they worked out the details and financing for the house next door. That house is actually my aunt Norma’s house, but for years, the small 2-bedroom was being used as a chicken coop for Jorge’s 20 chickens. My parents thought they could get the place expanded and refreshed quickly; the foundations of the house were strong, and my cousin Scott took on the project and hired a couple of masons to assist him. It’s not a small project though; the house is to have an additional bedroom and full indoor bathroom, a new roof, new floors, new windows, new doors, a new coat of paint, a parking space, and concrete to cover the whole floor of the front entrance. As of the time I’m writing this, the renovations are still not complete, but the house has a new roof, and it’s looking like an actual house and no longer a sloppily patched up concrete thing.
Since then, we’ve learnt some of the beats of the neighborhood. On the daily, cars, motorcycles, trucks, and the occasional horse-and-buggy go through these streets with ease and sometimes reckless abandon. The trucks with 5-gallon filtered water coolers come by every other day, and you pay 20 lempiras to trade in empty containers for new ones. Some water trucks announce themselves with either a jingle or the recorded shout of whatever company they’re from through a loudspeaker. Vegetable vendors in trucks roll on by with product that may or may not contain worms, loudly announcing what they have in stock using an incomprehensible loudspeaker that rivals that of MTA subway stations. When it rains, water barrages its way down the street, turning it into a brown river stream full of detritus and garbage. There’s an old, portly man who goes for a lumbering walk on our street in the afternoon almost every day; I have yet to know who he is. Another man, Giovanni, goes house to house selling plastic bags of horchata sometimes. My parents buy from him and occasionally chat with him; so far I’ve learned that he used to be romantically involved with la señora Gladys, the woman who sells vegetables and fried chicken a few blocks down from us.
Upon arrival to the country, my mom immediately went on the hunt for the best deals on groceries, having my dad scour the downtown area (a.k.a. El Centro) to explore different grocery stores and bodegas.
So far, she’s impressed with the Sula bodega for fruit juices, yogurts, and the occasional sweet bread and El Delfin, which sells seafood and a delicious queso cuajada con chile. My parents have also grown fond of the sweet plantains sold at a fruit and vegetables stand near El Delfin. Those plantains have consistently been large and ripen beautifully; my parents now make a point to stop briefly on the way home from a grocery run to buy some. We’ve also had to get more familiar with the pulperías near us.
I haven’t shopped a lot at these so far; the only time I’ve gone was to buy sticks of butter for my mom to use in a birthday cake she made for my uncle Mando. It unfortunately took me going to three different pulperías and going “No, necesito mantequilla sólida.” every time the shop vendor brought over plastic bags of sour cream or margarine. The man selling at the third one I visited directed me to the one two blocks and a left down from him. That place is the only one so far that sells sticks of butter. I’d like to believe I’m not the only person in this neighborhood to have gone through this sort of journey. Then again, in a place where palm oil reigns supreme in households and local food joints, I don’t think there are many people looking for sticks of butter in the first place.
There are other things my family and I became privy to. For instance: the statue of a pigeon, “El Monumento de la Paz”, that serves as a landmark for the CA13 highway, a very sad-looking strip club right off said highway, the sonic themed car that according to my cousin Rachel has been around for a while now (and I have yet to capture a clear photo of unfortunately), and the many stray dogs and cats that wander and lie around the neighborhood.
That’s naming a few. Overall though, my family and I haven’t gone out all that much to explore the city. Traffic is a nightmare around here, the mid-afternoon heat is oppressive and heavy, and frankly we’re still getting our bearings here. There have been pleasant moments sprinkled throughout this time, my grandfather’s visits being one and the bonus of whenever his dog, Solovino, comes with. I’ve also enjoyed the few times I’ve gone over to Yenny’s house and played with her little kitten Bon Bon and argued with her dog Chappa. My cousins’ hospitality towards my family and I had been a relief, even with their inability to end a conversation no matter how many times they say they’re leaving for the night. It’s amusing to see that it’s a family trait, it’s no longer something exclusive to my mom.
We definitely had our unsavory moments though; we were forced to pay up thousands of dollars (USD) just to have the shipping container with our stuff get released from customs and delivered to us, all four of us and the two dogs have to share a dusty room with an old and rickety air conditioner, we’re still living out of our travel bags, there’s the back and forth between different offices and long waits while my parents tried to get their paperwork in order, the horrible lack of ventilation at Jorge’s house that produces an oven effect mid-day when the sun is at its strongest, and my credit card information got stolen by some asshole working at an Alutech location when buying the metal for the new ceiling. These experiences have left my family and I with way less money than anticipated and a general sense of discomfort, but we don’t feel put down by it. The reality of it is we can’t afford to. I know my parents aren’t ones to put up with bullshit no matter where they are but moving to a whole different country is no simple affair, and unless you have a lot of help and resources, it becomes very costly and time-consuming. Despite these setbacks, we don’t regret our decision to leave the United States. The foundations of the country are crumbling day by day, and we don’t see things getting better anytime soon. I know my family and I can adjust to life here, and once the house is in order, we’ll find our rhythm again.
There are things I look forward to here: painting the house soon, seeing what projects my mom comes up with, catching my dad relaxing out on the porch, making coffee for my parents and hopefully my grandfather should he visit in the morning. I’m especially looking forward to visits from my grandfather. That’s been one of the highlights for me so far; seeing how my mom dotes on him has been a delight. To me, my grandfather’s a fascinating man because of how similar he is to my mom. Both of them love “The Mentalist” TV show, they take great care of the animals in their lives, they prefer to eat their food buffet style, and they both found partners that everyone agrees are their “soulmates”. They have their disagreements too: my grandfather refuses to neuter Solovino despite my mom insisting he should and he refuses to release the turtles living in his pila into a nearby river in fear that people will nab them up and make them into soup.
I’m also looking forward to exploring more of Honduras. For our one-month anniversary in the country, my family and I went on a visit to Tela. It’s a popular resort town here, and it’s an hour drive away from the house. We had a delicious meal of roasted chicken, pork ribs, and sweet plantains at a spot close by the beach that afternoon; my mom threw a stray dog near us leftover bones and scraps from the meal. I got to swim in those warm beach waters as soon as I could afterwards, and I enjoyed every minute of it. If not for the fact that my family was roasting and standing near the shoreline, I probably could have gone the entire afternoon floating and splashing in those comforting waters.
As my parents have said, jokingly and not, “Honduras, me dueles.” Still, we’re happy to be here together. In time, this part of our lives will be something we’ll joke about over the dinner table on the holidays: with the dogs looking at us begging for scraps and some god awful movie my dad picked out playing on the TV.
Hugs 🤗 it seems like a lifetime ago that you left and not a month! Thank you for sharing your experiences - good and not so good. I hope Johnny is adjusting to life in Honduras, the house comes together, you can finally unpack, and your Mom continues to heal. I can't wait to read your next post! Xoxo
luv the way you write bro there’s such a clarity and clear cadence to it…. glad a lot of good has come out of a situation that largely started as a scary and fucked up life blowup