ESTA ES SU CASA—NOVEMBER 2015
JUST IN TIME
The never-ending birthday. As soon as I got back to Honduras, Elio and Mema—they picked me up at the airport!—took me out for a birthday lunch at Ni-Fu Ni-Far, a big fat restaurant specializing in beef from Argentina. Believe me, I was grateful, and I would have made a pig of myself under normal conditions, but I was still so stuffed from a month in St. Louis, I did my best just to save face. “I’ve got a spare tire,” I said, bouncing my bulging tummy. “That’s a tractor tire!” exclaimed Mema. Really, there was feast enough just being with them. Mema is due to get the cast off her broken foot sometime soon, though even if the bones are setting, lots of therapy is still due.
The topic of conversation was Jaime Rosenthal, a perennial try-out for President, never achieving the nomination but forever a mainstay in Liberal politics and Honduran society with the dozens of businesses he owns (including Banco Continental) and the newspaper he ran (El Tiempo, which somehow named him “Man of the Year” almost every year!). Now in his 80s, his life is ending in disgrace, thanks to a son and nephew who have been laundering drug money through his bank for more than a decade. Without Jaime’s knowledge?? The United States is bringing the charges and calling for the extraditions, but the government of Honduras, firmly in the hands of the National (conservative) party, is taking advantage of the situation to foreclose every single Rosenthal asset, including the bank (300,000 customers left holding the bag) and the newspaper, which over the years published columns written and ghost-written by Jesuits with no other opportunity for a national voice. Weirdest of all, the Rosenthal Zoo, with 9000 alligators, languishes untended.
As Elio and Mema declared, isn’t a man innocent till proven guilty? As personal acquaintances, they feel for Jaime’s plight. But this news comes sandwiched between one mayor after another taking perp walks for running drugs and hiring assassins. The mayor of Sulaco, just a few miles from where I live, ran a “banda” that rubbed out rivals, recently found in shallow graves, as many as 60 people, including the son of a teacher that works with Fermin in Morazan. In that case, the young man was not fast enough with the wanted information about some drug peddler he only knew by name.
Still in Tegus, I took Lily, Neysey, and Tito—Elvis and Dora’s kids all studying at the University, plus another friend Bayron, to lunch at Pizza Hut. This has to rank as one of my greatest “investments,” helping this family to accomplish something unheard of in Las Vegas, 3 kids at once in the University!
Then I returned to Las Vegas, just in time to celebrate a couple birthdays before I zoomed off to Progreso. First, Chemo’s niece Albita, more formally known as “Suyapa,” turning 4, who I presented with the Dora the Explorer backpack she asked for, courtesy of Jane Lindberg, who plucked it off amazon.com the moment I mentioned it in St. Louis. Then, Chemo’s cousin Lindolfito, turning 7, and to him I gave the toy cars that kids at Wydown Middle School had donated.
To Progreso, then, for a game with Nangui’s team Honduras-Progreso. They scored a goal early in the contest and held on for a 1-0 victory over Juticalpa. Honduras-Progreso has been in first place since day one, and they should finish there with just two games left in the regular season.
But guess what? Chemo did NOT go with me! I didn’t know what to think; first, he calls me “papa,” as I reported in the last CASA, and now he says, “I better not go; I’ve got to go to my First Communion classes.” Are you kidding me? He’s finally taking the sacrament seriously. Suddenly, the kid’s a candidate for sainthood!
I spent a few days then in Morazan, where I delivered the film Fermin had asked for (regular roll film, in those little canisters, still available at Walgreen’s!) and the Sleep-Eze he was eager to replenish. Maria was tending to some tiny kittens whose mother died the same day they were born. I was still sort of just winding down after the wall-to-wall visitations in St. Louis, but they surprised me with yet another birthday party! The whole family pitched in, and I couldn’t have been happier.
Now that I’m back in Las Vegas, the lines are forming, and the needs are multiplying, starting with Maricela with three appointments in a row, two for little daughter Mariana Teresa in Tegucigalpa and one for herself in Progreso. Dora from Nueva Palmira is still not healed from her hernia operation, and Chemo’s half-brother Santos is passing blood. These and other dire straights gouge out the substance I thought I had built up in my “account.” But in a country whose corruption bleeds over the whole hemisphere, I take heart from a quotation I saw from Pope Francis: “How shall we define who is a ‘human being’? A blessing? Yes, a human being is a blessing; a human being blesses others.”
The living look for some helping hand, and the dead, as the sweet Book of Wisdom says, “are in the hands of God.” So I spent a lot of time in our cemetery on November 2, the Day of the Dead, more piously called the “Poor Souls.” Folks had been chopping down weeds for a week in anticipation of the observance; then flowers, pine needles, ribbons, and other memorabilia would decorate our loved ones’ resting places. I usually sit by the grave of Miguel, and not only because it’s in the shade or because we share a name. He was a teen who died in 1991, struck by lightning in his corn field. Every year his mother arrives with another “corona” (crown) of flowers. The never-ending story, and each of us has one, blessings all around.
Peace,
Miguel
