Postcard from a barbecue overlooking Tegucigalpa

I had not been to impressed with Tegucigalpa and had resolved to leave town if Honduras couldn’t “show me” something. I wandered into a bar with a guy playing a guitar. It wasn´t a concert, and he wasn´t a mariachi musician, just a guy with a guitar playing songs, everybody knew the words to. There is a tremendous charge from a small roomful of people shouting along to songs they've loved for years. It was one of the things which impressed me when I went out with my Mexican roommates in Boston: dozens of impassioned voices chanting together. I didn´t recognize the Spanish songs, but every so often he would throw in something by the Beatles. There was a woman at the bar who looked familiar, and indeed turned out to be a coworker from Guatemala. She introduced me to Roberto, a Honduran with charm and a cap with a single metal spike stuck like a horn on the bill. We talked about punk music and I ended up accompanying him and two Quebecois aide workers to a series of bars: one playing meringue, one playing US heavy metal like Metallica and Guns and Roses, and one playing funky electronica. I ended the night grabbing a burrito from the Quickie mart. Roberto invited me to a barbecue at his house the next night.

The next day I hung out with my colleague from Guatemala and went to a park with a giant statue of Jesus and a smaller one of Confucius. Back at the aide workers dorm the Quebecois girls were watching Sex and the City on DVD and talking about their night with Roberto. Then we walked over to Roberto’s, on a hillside next to a former president's house. His ability to barbecue was not great, but we sat around the bonfire looking down on the lights of the city below. Some came from skyscrapers and some came from shantytowns.

Roberto´s laptop blared out Juana’s Addicion as the Hondurans, mostly upper middle class university students studying business, discussed the new Che Guevara movie. The capitalists seemed very impressed with the socialist revolutionary his ideas and passion. I chatted up a girl whose parents owned an auto repair shop and was studying pharmacology. Her eyes lit up when she talked about her trip to Mexico City and seeing theatre, and how people here in the provincial capital of Tegucigalpa didn’t seem to think about art. Then her friend dragged her off. Roberto’s parents’ house had a beautiful glass deck, leather sofa, and a kitchen with all the modern conveniences. though all this paled in comparison to the yellow mansion next door. This was the side of the hill with the view of the city. Rich people had moved into this area after the last earthquake destroyed the homes which had been here. And across the street and sixty feet away was an adobe shack with no glass in the windows.