A banana republic  
     Honduras is roughly the size of Pennsylvania, with a population of about 5.5 million. If you haven't looked at a map lately, it sits in the middle of Central America, with both Pacific and Caribbean coastlines and land borders with Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Although Honduras is mostly mountainous, the Caribbean coastal plain is low and hot, a perfect place for growing bananas. One of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, Honduras is the quintessential banana republic, a nation whose history has been controlled by foreign corporations and governments.  
     It's also the odd country out in the region. While its warring neighbors received lots of press in the last decade, Honduras got little attention, except for its ancillary role in the neighboring conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador (a role for which the country was aptly dubbed the USS Honduras). Today, however, with the whole region moving toward peace, some fascinating things are going on here, including a struggle against impunity and efforts by political leaders to bring the military under civilian control.  
     One example of that is the effort by the Honduran legal system to bring to justice those responsible for the forced disappearance of 184 people in the 1980s. Thirteen military officials are currently on the lam after courageous judges braved threats and bombings to issue warrants for their arrest. The army refuses to turn them over to the justice system.  
     Many of the wanted officials were part of Battalion 3-16, a special branch of the army set up to torture and kill political dissidents. The battalion's leaders were specially trained at military bases in the United States. At home, they used CIA interrogation manuals that described recommended torture techniques.  
     As Honduras tries to deal with its past, the U.S. government can make a positive contribution by coming clean about its own participation here. The Honduran government's Human Rights Commissioner has requested that the U.S. government turn over files regarding operations in Honduras during recent decades. President Clinton promised in 1995 that he would cooperate, yet the papers have been slow in emerging, and what's been revealed to date has been heavily censored. The sooner the U.S. government overcomes its embarrassment about its sins in the region and turns over all the information requested by Honduras, the sooner this country can get on with healing the wounds of the past.  

Faith under fire  
     Lyda works here with the Christian Development Commission (CCD), which was born in those turbulent early eighties when Honduras had three foreign armies using its territory. Salvadoran government troops, Nicaraguan contras, and U.S. soldiers were all using Honduras as a staging ground for their own purposes. At the same time, tens of thousands of refugees came fleeing over the borders escaping violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.  
     In the highly politicized environment of the time, Honduran military officials branded the Salvadoran refugees as guerrilla sympathizers. Those who worked with the refugees were often labeled as communists. That was the case with a handful of dedicated Protestant church workers from the National Evangelical Emergency Committee (CEDEN), which was contracted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide services to the Salvadorans. Serving the Salvadoran refugees earned CEDEN condemnation from the military, the press, and the U.S. ambassador. As the pressure increased, in early 1982 the churches that sponsored CEDEN voted to stop all work with the UNHCR and refugees. Thirty-four employees of CEDEN resigned in protest of the decision, and nine of them courageously announced they would start a new organization that would allow church people to work with the victims of the region's political violence. That group is today CCD.  
     In addition to continuing the work with refugees, CCD began working in five marginalized rural communities, helping peasants discover the abundance of life promised them in the Gospels. Yet less than four months after the founding of the new group, the military entered its offices in the night and stole everything, including entire file cabinets and even the pictures on the walls. Two staff people were captured and tortured. International pressure led to their eventual release, but they spent three months in the hospital recovering from their injuries.  
     At the same time, military death squads published a list of people to be assassinated. The first person on the list had already been killed. Next on the list was Noemi de Espinoza, the director of CCD. She and her family were forced to go into exile in the U.S., and another CCD leader, Daniel Medina, also fled the country for his own safety. But the rest of the staff kept working, with growing support from foreign churches. In 1988, a United Methodist missionary doing human rights work with CCD was declared persona non grata by the Honduran government.  
     Fifteen years later, much has changed in Honduras. The refugees have gone home. The Salvadoran soldiers and the contras are gone, though they left thousands of assault weapons behind, making the AK-47 the weapon of choice for robbing banks or settling family disputes. The U.S. military has reduced its presence, but continues to operate a giant air base at Comayagua, an hour north of here. Many Hondurans consider the base a serious lesion on their national pride.  
     While the cold war is over, the oppression of the poor continues, though economic forces have taken over the role once played by the military. Honduras today has one of the worst patterns of income distribution in the world: the richest 10 percent of the population receives 41.9 percent of national income, whereas the poorest 40 percent receives only 11.2 percent of all income. More than 70 percent of the people live in poverty. And it's getting worse. Pressured by international lending organizations to spend more than a third of its budget on servicing the country's $4.3 billion foreign debt, the government has implemented a series of neoliberal reforms, including devaluation of the national currency, higher taxes, and increased costs for public services.  
     As the country has changed in the last 15 years, CCD has grown. The organization today has 64 staff working in 113 communities, promoting community development through programs in sustainable agriculture, alternative credit, literacy, community-based health care, pastoral attention, cultural identity, and other facets of improving the quality of rural life. And, just as its original commitment to serve the poor remains intact, it continues to suffer for its witness. CCD staff, including Noemi de Espinoza, last year received death threats as a result of the organization's support for hungry peasants in Santa Barbara who had taken over unused farmland belonging to large landowners.  

Theology and gender  
     Lyda has been assigned to CCD's program on "Organization and Gender." It's the kind of work that a few years ago would have been called "women's ministries." Yet CCD and some other NGOs have learned that if gender dynamics are really going to change in the community then women's participation and work cannot be relegated to a separate arena of attention. Men and women must change together. Overall development plans must not work with women on the side, but rather incorporate and target for empowerment the two groups that have often been excluded from traditional development schemes, namely women and children.  
     Lyda has become CCD's resident gender theologian. This year, for example, she's designing and carrying out a program of theological education with CCD staff throughout the country, helping them reflect on biblical paradigms for gender justice. This will help them evaluate whether in their day-to-day work of development they're realizing what God wants for everyone in the community. This involves looking at what it means to be male and female, and how the issue of gender plays out in questions of human rights and legal responsibilities. Issues such as who owns family farmland, who gets hit when family discussions turn violent, and who decides about pregnancies are all issues about which Lyda is helping staff develop an increased awareness.  
     Lyda has also been called in as a consultant in certain communities. In La Esperanza, for example, CCD has been talking for some time about family planning as a way for women to take better care of themselves and their children. Fifteen pregnancies are simply not good for the mother, nor the children. Yet in La Esperanza, a local Catholic priest mounted a counterattack, claiming that all family planning was sinful and that CCD was leading the women astray. Some evangelical pastors agreed. Women began to drop out of training events and a few even resigned from little cooperative businesses that CCD had helped get started. CCD staff and community leaders discussed what to do. They took a census in the community, demonstrating the lack of available family planning information, the high rates of miscarriages and infant mortality, and the serious prevalence of gynecological problems among women. A decision was made to face the issue head on, and a serious of community gatherings were organized. The planners of the meetings invited Lyda to meet with them to talk about a "theology of reproductive rights." Lyda posed some questions for them, such as why, if our bodies are supposed to be temples of the spirit, women are pushed to wear themselves out with pregnancy after pregnancy in order to bring children into the world to die of diarrhea and hunger. She also asked about how God works in our lives. Was it God's will, for example, that Antonia should get married at 13 and have intercourse with her husband every time he came home drunk, resulting in six pregnancies before she was 20 years old? Moreover, did God decide that two of those pregnancies would end in miscarriages and that two of the four babies born alive would die before they reached 12 months of age? The town meetings were packed and the discussion lively. The women continue to work with CCD.  
     CCD has begun the construction of a women's shelter, only the second one in the Tegucigalpa area. Lyda is pleased to be part of that effort. The shelter is going to be built by volunteer work teams. Lyda is also assisting CCD staff in a variety of ways to analyze how CCD and other NGOs, as well as the government, can strengthen their ministries with marginalized women. In the course of one such day, while accompanying a woman psychiatrist from the U.S. on a tour of the government's psychiatric hospital in Tegucigalpa, Lyda was taken hostage for five minutes by a patient who offered to exchange her for his freedom. His fellow patients finally talked him into letting Lyda go. Never a dull day around here.  

Landing in Teguz  
     Paul finally overcame the distraction of watching orioles fight over the fruit in the guayaba tree just outside his office, located in the back of our home, and he finished a series of articles on Brazil. He made two trips back to Guatemala late in the year and has written at length about the peace process there (see, for example, The Christian Century from February 5). In recent weeks he's also written about how churches are adapting in post-cold war Central America, how democratization is proceeding in Honduras, and how blacks along the Caribbean coastline of Central America are struggling to keep their lands from being stolen by foreign companies. In the next two months he'll keep an eye on peace in Guatemala while also covering several stories in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Besides denominational magazines like Response and New World Outlook, you can find Paul's regular articles in Latinamerica Press and occasional pieces in the National Catholic Reporter.  
     Coming home to Tegucigalpa in an airplane is always an exciting experience. Because it's surrounded by mountains, the airport in Tegucigalpa is one of the most dangerous in the world. After almost every landing the passengers applaud the pilot. It makes covering the region almost as exciting as visiting the psychiatric hospital.  
     We've wanted to write this first newsletter from our new home for some time now, to let you know we were alive and well. But we're, well . . . we're behind. With two growing kids (both of whom just signed up for soccer teams, ahh!!) and two challenging jobs there are a lot of necessary things that just keep getting put off for another day. We still haven't made curtains. (Well, there is one curtain that Paul made with a sheet and a stapler. . .) The vegetable garden has been half-planted for two months. But all is not delayed. We did manage to get a tree house built over the Christmas holidays. And we travelled as a family to the ancient Maya ruins at Copan.  
     We're enjoying Honduras and our new assignments. After the trauma of our last months in Guatemala, we're feeling blessed to be here. Should any of you find yourselves headed for Central America, remember us here in the Central American country that everyone forgets. We've got a little guest cottage in our back yard, and we'd love some help in making curtains.  
     Thanks for the variety of ways you support our ministries here in Central America. Know that we pray for you and the creative and life-giving work that you carry out in communities around the world. We are united in a great web of love and solidarity. Peace be with you all.