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'Our island' a Bonacca Perspective by Alfonso Ebanks

Humanity Lost
It was not too many years ago that this island was a safe and beautiful place to live. We were known as isolationist and pirates by persons from outside, but within the community we were a kind and caring people. It is very hard to determine any one reason for the deterioration of the whole community; but for unknown reasons we the people have adopted a big city attitude towards our neighbors and friends.
In big cities the population is so great that the people become introverted and do not display any respect, affection or kindness for their neighbors. Their attitude is of self-preservation, exclusiveness and they believe that by closing their front doors they will be safe from the evils that go on outside. We have lost our moral responsibility to our neighbors. We no longer train our children to respect and show kindness to others.
When I was a kid, respect for our elders was so important that if anyone even suggested that some of us had broken this rule our parents did not spare the rod. A few months ago I saw a small child climbing over a neighbor's fence and out of my concern for the child's safety I told him that he should not be doing that. This seven-year-old child had me told off properly and let me know that I was not his boss and should therefore keep my suggestion for my own child. The child fell on his way back over the fence and broke his arm in two places.
 When the other kids told the parents that I had warned the kid but he had not heeded my warning, the father told me that I should have taken a stick to him. This same father has gotten into many a row because of his ill-mannered kid for reasons far less drastic than someone taking a stick to his kid.
We have lost our ability to share the grief of our neighbors. In years gone by whenever someone died the barrooms were closed and the shop doors were closed at the passing of the coffin. On these occasions the town came together and built the coffin, dug the grave and sat with relatives of the dead and everybody went to the funeral services and interment. For weeks after the funeral some of the town's women did the cooking and the house work for the survivors. All this has changed. Now people die and are weeks buried before the word gets out.
On one recent occasion a restaurant owner lost his uncle to old age and decided to close his business for the night, out of respect for the old gentleman. The complaints were many and some of the more daring came to his house to demand that he open the restaurant, citing the known fact and well-versed argument that no matter what we do we cannot bring back the dead. We have lost our ability to display affection for our neighbors.
However, there is still one thing that we are good at: the propagation of malicious gossip. Even the members of the church take an active part in the spreading injurious information.
We are not dead but we may as well be. We have lost our humanity; and when we lose our humanity we revert to the animal within us all. It's our humanity that lifts us above all other living things and without it our chances for salvation are slim.

When in Rome...
On a bright sunny morning not too long ago I found myself on the main street on the Cay in Bonacco. My attention was drawn to the lovely roll of a piano playing a very familiar tone. As I drew nearer I realized that it was Saturday morning and the music was coming from the large cement building that dominates that part of the cay-the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
I noticed that even though the music was very familiar, the lyrical component was in another language. As one of the few original Bonaccains left and an avid churchgoer in my youth, I found the singing of the Old Rugged Cross in Spanish quite strange.
I had never given it a thought before, but on that day I wondered if Jesus could speak Spanish and my train of thought went back to the fact that I had never questioned his ability to understand and speak the English language.
I guess this stems from the fact that as a kid I always had the idea that Jesus was an English-speaking Caucasian. The locals call the building the "Spanish Church" and, though it bears no resemblance at all to what most of us imagine a church should look like, the Spanish-speaking followers of the Seventh Day Adventist religion gather there to have their worship and other meetings.
 It has been a while now since the Seventh Day Adventists on the island of Bonacco have been split into two groups-English-speaking and Spanish-speaking. The original English-speaking church took the back seat in attendance.
It has been about a hundred and twenty years since a great grand aunt of mine brought the Seventh Day Adventist message to these islands from the United States. For all these hundred odd years the church in Bonacco has prevailed through all kinds of troubles and tribulations. With this new arrangement pulling the younger members of the religion towards another gathering place, I don't see much of a future for the Original Church.
The little white church house in the middle of the Cay was once the focal point of this town, and all the hard-working people of the Cay would gather on Saturday morning to sing praises, commune with their God and greet their neighbors. The original building of that little white church house has long since been replaced with a more modern structure, but there is hope that the traditions will continue.
This division of the Seventh Day Adventist Church is just one of the symptoms of a great change that is taking place on Bonacco. The old catch-phrase, "When in Rome do as the Romans do," does not apply to our situation because the Spanish people came among us bringing their customs and their language. They came in such numbers that we were the ones who had to adapt. Instead of the newcomers learning English, we as the largest minority on the island had to learn Spanish.
They came to Rome and changed the Romans. Pitiful, but it brings to mind the words of a native who predicted that in a period of fifty years the English language on Bonacco would be a thing of the past. That native has been dead for about twenty five years, so we don't have long to go. Adios Amigos.

The Last Neanderthal
His name was Nook and he lived about thirty thousand years ago. He was the top hunter and chief arbitrator of his clan. Whenever there was a dispute among the members of his group, Nook was called upon to settle it. Nook also had one distinguishing characteristic that made him stand out from the rest of his group: he was a head taller than all the rest. On this particular winter afternoon his mind was occupied with the things he had seen just this morning. Earlier, he had climbed the hill that separated his little valley from the huge river basin on the other side and had beheld a strange scene. Nook saw it as strange, but little did he know that on the other side of that little mountain he had seen the force that would change his whole way of life and the lives of his entire group and their kind. On the other side of that hill he had spotted another race of bipedal mammals much like but yet very different from himself.
Nook knew that it would be only a matter of time before the new arrivals would discover his group and he was not sure what would happen. He knew from trail debris and animal remains that there was another group in the valley but until now he had believed them to be of his own kind.		 Nook moved his clan farther up the valley; but because he was so completely fascinated by the new arrivals, he made daily trips in an effort to observer them from his secret vantage point. He noticed that even the female members of the new group were taller than anyone in his own clan, and they all had skin of a lighter color and were less hairy than his own. The strange clan seemed to work together more harmoniously and to use toned down vocalization to communicate with each other rather than with calls and gestures. Nook took his clan a week's walk from the little hill and left them on their own. He had decided to steal one of those females from the river basin on the other side of the hill and make her his wife.
If he succeeded in this great venture he would have to keep his new wife separated from the females of his clan because he was sure that they would destroy her. Nook was successful in surviving the fury of the other group, and his new wife survived the females of his own clan. He had taken the step which would guarantee that his genes would survive for all time, and he would never know that his offspring would proliferate and eventually dominate most of the western part of the Iberian Peninsula.
Nook was a Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and his gene flow would be the major factor in creating the stock of the Iberians. Many thousands of years later his genes would be carried to Hispanic America by the crews on the vessels of European founders and colonizers. The Castilian Spaniards used Iberians as crew and soldiers on all their voyages to the new world. Iberians were also left behind to "hold the fort" for the Spaniards. They are still here. Look around and you will find that Nook has us surrounded.

A Bad Hair Week

The flight to the coast was on time and this alone should have been a portent of things to come. Everything started going wrong from the time I reached the airport at La Ceiba; my regular taxi driver was not available and the one I got overcharged me.
Later that afternoon I tried to book passage on a bus going to Tegus, but I could not get a ticket for my 11-year-old boy because he could not produce an ID card. Two taxi fares later I had everybody booked on the Herman-Alas executive express to Tegus.
The next morning after all my luggage was brought into the station, the younger of the two men behind the desk came over and, using his best drill sergeant voice, said to me: "What do you have in that cooler?" I did not know what kind of game he was playing, so I told the truth: "Frozen seafood!"
That was the wrong thing to say. His little beady eyes lit up and his upper lip went pale. An air of accomplishment came over his whole person and he said, "It is forbidden to ship seafood on this bus line." Though I argued, in the end I had to call my cabbie to take the seafood back to the hotel.
The following day as we headed for the Embassy, the taxi drivers in the city decided to block all the street intersections. The police finally cleared the streets and the trip took a little longer than usual, but we arrived at the Embassy on time.
The Window B affair went off nicely. Miss Wendy Mejia is a courteous, kind and very helpful person. Whenever prizes become available for persons that, without any personal gain, can be kind to strangers, I will recommend her for first prize. The same cannot be said for the gentleman sitting in Window 7, who turned down every single visa application that had gone up to his window. I was looking for a visa for my sixteen-year-old daughter, and when this gentleman turned me down I literally went into shock.
I had this one figured for a sure thing: I'm a US citizen and the child's mother is a US citizen. I had every piece of paper anyone could ask for--my business permits, my bank statements, the registration form for my lobster boat, a letter from the packing house where I sell the product, deeds for some property, a notarized letter from the child's mother authorizing the application. I even had my US military honorable discharge form. But this guy never checked any of it. He just said NO. I muttered something in the way of expressing my disbelief, and we eventually got a single application visa for the kid.
I guess we were lucky because we left with a visa unlike some others who left in tears, humiliated and angry at his incomprehensible attitude. Most of us cannot accept rejection; but knowing that there is a legitimate reason for the rejection, not just somebody's whim, helps to ease the pain. This gentleman's attitude leads me to believe that there should be more screening and better training in the human resources section of the State Department.
I believe that a person holding such an important position should divest themselves of mood swings, angst, anger, domestic problems, hangovers and personal prejudices before coming to work in the morning. Mister "Window 7" should remember that his citizenship came about by an accident of birth and that mine was by choice and some sacrifice. I´m sorry he's not assigned to the embassy in Paris.

Road to Freedom
Felix had lived all his life in Castro's Cuba so any other kind of life was unknown to him. He was born and still lived in the province of Camaguey. As a young child he lived in the town of Florida, only a few miles west of the city of Camaguey. His family moved to the city sometime later in his life. This decision was controlled by the state.
His family had been on the waiting list of the Office of Interchange for many months before the move could be completed. The Interchange Office arranges moves between people that want to move to the cities and people that want to move to other towns and villages. The interested parties simply swap living quarters, there is never a fee or rent involved because all the housing units on the islands are owned by the government. Felix was now in his late twenties and he had become dissatisfied with a system that advocates the government's ownership of the natural resources, industry, banking, the news media, public utilities and even housing of the entire country. His spirit yearned for something else. He had heard all about the country to the north where individuals could determine their own destiny.
Felix loved his country but he decided to leave his beloved Cuba as soon as things could be arranged. His escape would have to be by homemade boat because all other means were controlled by the government. The most important item on his list of things that he must have was a small outboard motor for the boat he would build. That motor would be his means to another place and another life. A life far different from the one he was used to. From the time he was born his life had been regimented by the state and now the time had come for him to make a change. With the help of friends and family in Cuba and relatives in the USA, Felix made ready for the greatest event of his life.
It was decided that the northern route was too dangerous because it was patrolled by Cuban patrol boats and also by ships of the American Coast Guard. The route to the south was the round about way, but it was safer. They would head for the Grand Caymans and then on to Honduras from where they could arrange their overland trip to the north. The little 28 foot boat left Camaguey on a Friday night with 18 persons on board, persons that were willing to risk their life in order to create a better life for themselves. They tried to pass the southern islands in the dark but the little boat was only a few miles from the Cuban coast when the motor conked out. They got it going again before the dawn could lift its curtain of darkness that shielded them from the law.
After three days of drifting and getting the little motor to run for a few minutes at a time they were picked up by a fishing boat and they were landed on Swan's Island.
They had somehow bypassed the Caymans but at least they were in Honduras. The military personnel on Swan Island notified their counterparts at the Navy Base in Castilla and a fisherman from Guanaja was authorized to pickup the Cubans that had been left on the Swan. For a price of two hundred dollars a head they were brought to the island of Guanaja.
The spent another few hundred dollars getting the necessary paperwork that would enable them to travel to the mainland. On the morning of the third day on Guanaja, Felix and his traveling companions waved goodbye from the upper deck of the ferry boat to the dock below where the few Cubans that live on Guanaja waved back. Their next stop would be Trujillo and then after some more money on paperwork they were off on the last leg of their journey to freedom.
It is said that the trip through Mexico is more dangerous than the first part of their voyage across the ocean. The overland trip had been uneventful, all had gone according to the plan. Felix knew that the advantage the Cubans have over the rest of the citizens of Latin America is that once they set foot on the soil of the USA, they are home free. Six days after Felix left Guanaja he arrived at the home of his cousin May in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He had beaten the odds and now a new life lay in front of him, I wish him luck and I hope he learns to appreciate and support the political system and its many freedoms that inspired his dangerous trek. Felicidades Feliberto.

The Golden Calf
A few weeks ago I went over to the Cay on Bonacco and the church bell was pealing off the nine o'clock hour, the normal time for the start of Sabbath service in the SDA church. The street was filled with people carrying flowers and roses and other floral arrangements. I had never seen this before and I asked if someone had died. A kind lady told me that today was the last day of the Restoration Ministry in the Hispanic Seventh Day Adventist church, and the congregation had decided to pay tribute to the pastor. After all, he had come all the way from Mexico.
I commented that the SDA religion had never permitted offerings in the church to pay tribute to a pastor, the only tribute to be paid in the church was to be given to God. The flower carriers would later say the tribute was to Christ and not to the preacher. I mentioned that Christ had made the ultimate sacrifice and by doing so had put an end to offerings of that nature.

Whatever the reason for the extravagance, it was breaking with the traditional tenets of the religion they were supposed to be members of. The original Bonacco SDA Church and the religion it represents has maintained its credibility by always following a system of beliefs that has been with us since the SDA's foundation, some one hundred and fifteen years ago. These newest members of the SDA religion seem to be of a more liberal nature, and there is some concern that the lowering of the dress standards and a deviation from the tenets could occur.
We must remember that almost all the members of the Hispanic SDA Church were not born into the SDA religion. Most of them were at one time of the Catholic persuasion. Their previous religion is one of the most liberal and permissive of all the denominations of the Christian faith.
When I criticized the imported pastor I was quickly reminded that I was not a practicing Christian and that I had no right to criticize such a pious person. So I reminded them that when my English ancestors were off to the crusades to save Christendom, his Aztec ancestors were tearing the hearts out of living women and children to appease their many gods. I have been informed that besides the tens of thousands spent on flowers, the good pastor collected over three hundred and fifty thousand in cash for the cause. It is rumored that some people gave up properties and women donated their cell phones and their jewelry.
The bible does not mention anything about cell phones but it does mention the donation of jewelry. On that occasion the congregation, with the help of the chief temple tender, fashioned a Golden Calf to replace the true God of the Covenant. Maybe later that night they played bingo in the basement of the temple. Amen.

Whose Water Really Is It?
The ninth of October will go down in our history as a day of mourning. This day will be remembered as the day that the central government of Honduras gave away a huge swat of priceless maritime territory in the Caribbean Sea to the Ortega government of Nicaragua. While the politicians involved in this treacherous act celebrate their accomplishments, the rest of us who understand the extent of the damage done by this deed can only sit back and watch. Our lives are changed by a few over-ambitious politicians.
It is hard to get over the shock and anger at our impotence. Our government should have just taken a look back at the history of other claims by the Nicaraguans. In the 1950s we went to war because the Somoza government of Nicaragua claimed and was about to annex a large piece of Honduran territory. At that time they claimed to own the slice of land from the Cruta River to the Segovia River. Then, like now, it was all about petroleum that could "possibly" exist in the area. The geographical borders of Honduras were established hundreds of years ago, and the maritime limits are no exception.
Nicaraguans are famous for violating the border lines. On occasion their patrol boats have purposefully entered deep into Honduran waters to carry off vessels and crews with complete impunity. With the new border arrangements these incursions into our national territory will be more frequent and more bold because we have again proven that we are a weak people governed by weak-minded politicians.
In a previous attempt to safeguard our national territory the government of Honduras granted unsolicited citizenship to a group of Jamaican fishermen on the condition that they inhabit the cays in that area. The argument was that maybe the Mucos would respect the Jamaican natives and in that way we would be able to hold on to what was ours. The Jamaicans are still there on Savana Cay and the La Prensa has erroneously called them Miskito Indians. 		The politicians, the military and even Mr. Arevalo of the television news show Abriendo Brecha seem to think that giving up a mere twenty percent of the territory previously own by this country is a good thing. All these people must be too young to remember our war with Nicaragua and the cry on the lips of the people at that time: "Cruta es Nuestra." Maybe they can remember our war with El Salvador when we screamed, "Ni una Pulgada."
Politicians should listen to the people, and this time we are yelling, "Paralelo Quince." The 15th parallel is the only dividing line, and there are many reasons why this should not be altered. The primary reason being that from colonial times all the territory north of that parallel belonged to Honduras. That should be reason enough, but there are others. Another is that modern navigational equipment places all the cays inside Honduran waters. Another reason is that GPSs can be set to notify the captain of a vessel that he is approaching the 15th parallel maritime limits. With the new border and its diagonal and sometimes meandering course it will be impossible to always know when you are still in Honduran waters.
To give some kind of reassurance to the fishermen, the government will have to place marker buoys all along the new border, or come up with a scale that will consider all the possible positions that can be derived from a cross reference of your westerly position as it relates to the northern limits of the new border line. The political hullabaloo was all about the fact that we became the owners of the cays in that area. Everybody that knows the area is well aware that Honduras has always owned the cays with the only possible point of argument being the tip of South Cay- its southerly extension comes close to, or touches the 15th parallel. This and this alone should have been the subject of negotiations.
President Zelaya and his "citizen's power" government should have taken into consideration the patrimony and the welfare of the citizens of La Mosquitia, the Bay Islands, Colon and the growing fishing interest in the department of Atlantida. When two persons go to a poker table the two parties should carry something of value to the table. Nicaragua had nothing to lose and Honduras lost 21 percent of its previously owned territory. Now President Zelaya and his Liberal Party claim a victory.

Unfair Nature
Fany years ago a French doctor made it his concern to try to determine the physical differences between the human female body and that of the human male. As close as he could figure it, there is only about a five percent difference between the two, to which he commented "vive la difference"! If that good doctor had made a greater effort to understand the real difference and not only the comparative difference of human organs his work would have not been forgotten in time. Creationist contends that man was created from dust but women where made form the flesh and bone of the first man; a much better beginning if you ask me. Man has known for ages that women were made of better stuff and maybe that's reason women have mostly been relegated to second class citizenship for eons. There are only a few great women remembered by history. As that French doctor found out, there is not a great many differences in the biological make up of the two bodies but he should have delved into the nature of the human female and his conclusions would have been quite different. One of the most important and confusing differences is the fact that women live longer than men. Most scientist claims that this had to do with hormones and what not but I believe that in the very beginning the life span of men and women were identical, then she invented language and everything changed. Yes, it was a woman that invented the art of using words to express her thoughts, she needed language to gossip and to communicate with her young children in the dark. The usefulness of prehistoric woman continued into her old age because she was needed to take care of the children of the younger women that went on the hunt with their male partners. Prehistoric man on the other hand became useless as he aged and after he used the newly invented language of the women to pass on to his sons the knowledge he had acquired on the hunt, he became a non-contributing member of the clan and very dispensable. It is said that women are weaker than men. 		And in physical strength this may be so but she has a lot more inner strength and saves herself for the pains of child bearing and such stressful endeavors. Women have other attributes that go unnoticed as well. When compared to man she can stay afloat on water longer, she can starve longer, she can attend to more things at once that we can and she has a much higher threshold of pain that we have. She also has the ability to carry around a fifty pound load of flesh and fluids for months. This load displaces her internal organs in such a way that would probably kill a man. Her heart is pushed into the top of her chest cavity reducing the space she had for her lungs, her liver is pushed in her rib cage, her elastic belly extends to the point that she can no longer see her toes and through all this she can seem cheerful and rarely complains. From that belly she can produce a child that is from 20 to 40 percent of her height and 5 to 15 percent of her weight, fantastic, don't you think? Women love to beautify things and she plants roses and flowers. She can also make mundane things sound pleasant. She took the word most used to express true sentiment and put it to a whole different meaning because it was a woman that called her adulterous partner a "lover" and the act of having sex she calls it making love but she knows that the one has nothing to do with the other. As a woman ages she loses the ability to bear children but nature keeps her equipment in tip top conditions long after her child bearing age is over. On the other hand as man ages he keeps his ability to procreate but he almost always suffers from equipment failure. That is why women say that men can have sex when they are able to but women can have sex whenever they please. This seems to me that nature has been unfair to men. But the French are right when they say: Vive la femme!.

Trick Me Once Shame on You...
From the deck of the small sloop, Elder Hutchins and his wife Cora gazed at the rolling hills and white beaches of the historically famous and easternmost island of the Bay Islands Archipelago off the coast of Honduras. This was the island that almost four hundred years earlier Christopher Columbus had named the Isle of Pines, but he could have also called it Isle of Cacao because it was here that he tasted what would later be called chocolate. It was the first time chocolate had been tasted by any European.
The Hutchins were about to disembark on the island of Bonacco. The year was 1892, and they had come a long way from their home in the United States. Elder Hutchins had given up his dream of becoming a doctor to answer the call of the General Conference to become a missionary on these islands. It was only about 5 year earlier that the message of the Seventh Day Adventist was brought to these islands by Elizabeth Elwin, sister of Angelo Elwin, the founder of Mangrove Bight on Bonacco. At her request the General Conference had decided to send a missionary to further the message of the fairly new religious denomination in this area.
Prior to the arrival of the Elder, a few tracks and pamphlets had been passed out among the natives but there was no predominant organized religion in this place. The one gathering place that existed on the Cay was an interdenominational church where a few persons from various denominations would take turns holding services for their own. The very first time that Elder Hutchins held a church service on Bonacco, the turnout was impressive. The Elder knew that he was on fertile ground because these people were hungry for the word. 		After the service the Elder met all those in attendance and was surprised to find out that even the local Methodist minister had come out to hear the sermon. He would later tell his wife that he now knew that the sacrifices they had made in order to be here would be worth it.
The Elder's previous gatherings on the island of Roatan had not been encouraging, so he decided that it must be this island that God had chosen to further his works in this part of the world. After the conversion and baptism of many of the populace, the new converts were able to purchase the gathering hall from the other denominations. The Bonacco Seventh Day Adventist church was born, the first SDA church of the Inter-American Division. The little, white church house in the center of the Cay became the focal point in the spreading of the Adventist message to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. From here the Inter-American Division of the General Conference would send forth the message, from Boca del Toro to Panama and Bonanza, from Nicaragua to Morant Point in Jamaica.
With the keel hewn from a giant Bonacco pine, timbers from Jamaica and planking from Tampa, the local craftsmen (all charter members of the new church) built a little schooner for Elder Hutchins. The Elder, who by now had taught himself dentistry, used the schooner to carry the word abroad, while selling books and filling and pulling teeth to pay his way.
A few days ago, had they been around to see it, the good Elder Hutchins and those charter members of that first church would have been in shock to find out that after 115 years of existence the little white church was abandoned so that the members could attend a sort of revival held in the other Adventist church on Bonacco. It's a huge cement building, called the Spanish Church, that dominates that area of the Cay. I don't think I'll ever get used to the singing of the Old Rugged Cross in Spanish. It seems alien to me even to the point of being blasphemous. I can't help but wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the little, white church in the middle of the Cay that has meant so much to so many for so long.

Trick Me Once Shame on You...

What we might be getting is some kind of immigration control and established companies will get permits to import duty free, anything considered to be directly related to the tourist industry. This consideration has to be determined by personnel of customs.
What about us little guys? Tricked again, my friend. But, we did get our 750 lempiras license to carry arms rescinded. I can remember an incident that I consider to be one of the biggest screwing over that we Bonaccan ever got from the Honduran government.
It was sometime in the late 1940's after years of begging for help that the government decided to help us get running water in our houses on the Cay. To get this project off the ground we would need about 1,800 feet of two inch pipe to cross from the main island to the Lower Cays. The whole town turned out to greet the little freighter that was bringing the pipes. We got a couple of hundred pipes, but the glee of the town soon turned to astonishment and then to anger when the pipes were inspected and it was determined that the pipes were all four inch cast iron sewer pipes that had to be joined together with melted lead. Instead of pipes for potable water, the government had sent us sewage pipe that had to be joined with hot lead at seven fathoms down on the ocean floor.
We eventually got some 2 inch brass pipe, but not from the Honduran Government. At this very moment the Ministry of Tourism is in the process of laying sewage lines on the Cay and I was surprised to see that the largest diameter pipe they are using is 6 inch PVC. That size pipe seems a little small to me as it is the same size I use in my house and I only have 4 baths. There are at least one thousand bathrooms on this Cay. I firmly believe that we should get ready for another screwing over and this time it will have a very distinctive odor.

Iast December in a privately owned resort in the municipality of Roatan, la crème de la crème of the political powers in Honduras gathered to make a decision on the future of the Bay Islands. With no more than two "diputados" voicing their opposition to the idea of granting free port status to these islands, it was a forgone conclusion that at last the Honduran Government had came up with an idea that would benefit the whole archipelago and all its inhabitants.
The idea was superb and the people talked about nothing else for weeks. We Guanajeños could hardly wait until the idea was passed into law and published so we all could start forging our own futures without the burden of sales tax, income tax and duties on our imports. We conducted a census of our people so that only the natives and other people living in the islands at this particular time would benefit from this new law.
We finished the census and waited and according to rumors we will be waiting for a long, long time for the free port dream to come true. Away from the aroma of broiled lobster and the vapors of very expensive scotch whiskey, our distinguished legislative body had second thoughts about what they were going to do for the Bay Islands. According to persons in the know, the honorable members of the National Congress held meeting after meeting and whittled down the original idea until it was exactly what they intended to give us in the first place… nothing.

Falling on Hard Times

Some of those owners never saw it necessary to own a home on this island.The money they made was invested in other parts of the country. Other packing plant owners amassed huge sums of money in other countries and made local banks loans to operate their plants. This island is going down the drain fast because of the huge amount of money that has left this place over the last few decades. There has not been a consequential investment on Guanaja in many years and the cash outflow continues until this day.
Not only packing house owners are guilty of shipping money off-island. Lately they are getting a lot of help from the three telephone companies that provide services on Guanaja. Of these three companies, only Hondutel has any salaried employees in Bonacca Cay, a grand total of four. Hondutel, Megatel and Celtel take millions out of here on a regular basis and that money is gone forever. There is not much that can be done about that. Our local cable network does the same thing.
With the fishing industry on the way out and no one trying to do anything else, there is not much hope that we will come out of these hard times soon. There is some hopeful news that someone is starting to build a first class hotel on the north side. This is good, but only a very few locals will get work with those foreign owned hotels. To help the whole island we need local investors to build small hotels and finance locally owned sport fishing and diving activities.
I know that European tourism will increase in these islands in the next few years in part due to terrorist activity in their usual Asian destinations. American tourism will also increase at the expense of the Cayman tourist industry. This is due to the fact that their biggest attraction, the feeding of stingrays, is no longer attractive after the accidental death of Steve Erwin sometime last year while handling a stingray.
For us to take advantage of this, we need to convince the few people of means that we have left to help bolster our overtaxed infrastructure and look towards an economy based on tourist dollars. They should set other goals not only for themselves, but also for the whole town and then maybe we will be able to pull ourselves out of this precarious economic situation in which we find ourselves.
In these times of economical stress whenever I mention the desperate straits in which we find ourselves on Guanaja I always get the same response, "it's tough everywhere." This is fine for a response but it does not help the situation too much. Every body seems to have a different opinion as to how and why we find ourselves falling on hard times.
Some of these opinions are based on just a little fact and a lot of conjecture. There is one thing that is certain and that is that the bank is calling in some long overdue notes and the people that owe the bank cannot come up with the money. For too long we have based our economy on the fishing industry. Most boat owners are not only indebted to the bank, but they also owe a lot of money to the packing houses. Some of us kept borrowing money to buy boats even long after the hand writing on the wall foretold of a dying industry. We have over-fished, caught undersize and spawning lobsters in violation of every conservation law ever written. We have used borrowed money to coerce any government official with any authority into doing our bidding. We offered them big money for permits to fish lobster and even though there have not been any new slots available for many years, those officials took our money and issued those permits.
With so many more boats fishing the same product, our limited resource (lobster) had to be shared into so many more pieces that some of us couldn't make enough money to pay our bills. One thing I must say is that almost all of the money made by the boat owners went into this town's economy. The same cannot be said for the owners of the packing plants. I cannot recall any incident on any occasion that the owners of any of the packing houses did anything of mentionable merit for the town from whence they extracted their millions.

Dear Mr. Bush

The children of those people who got old and have never contributed to the SSA must be obligated to take care of their parents. If these old folks do not have any kids then they should look toward the churches for support, or toward other organizations that beg millions every year for poor people overseas. Part of your job is to remind these organizations that charity begins at home and to remind everyone that the US government is not a charitable organization. You should make it a federal crime for individual states to maintain healthy poor people. That's like force-feeding a two-legged horse. There is nothing to get from that.
After you weed out these bums and goldbrickers, there is something else you can do to guarantee the survival of the SSA. You must open your borders to everyone who is healthy and is between the ages of 18 and 30. This will guarantee Social Security income for a long time. These workers will not be allowed to open IRA's and such things, and they would have to pay the maximum payment allowed by law no matter what their salaries are. These workers will be deported on their 61 birthday and they can be deported before that if they miss one payment to the system. The latter will be deported to their native countries on foot after they have swam the Rio Grande going in the opposite direction as new emigrants.
On your problem in Iraq you must call the Pope and, if he will talk to you, let him know that we are not fighting insurgents and terrorist as is believed by some. This war is Islam against Christendom, and it will have to be fought in every corner of this earth. The Pope must convince his followers (one billion or so) that in order for them to avoid a delay on their way to heaven (bypass purgatory), they must consider all Muslims as unbelievers and infidels. Christians must do as the Muslims have taught them: They must kill an infidel so their stay in paradise will be guaranteed and upon arriving in heaven they will be presented with seven virgins and all the Italian wine they can drink.
Dear Mr. Bush, I hope these ideas have been of some help to you. If you could run again, I'd vote for you.

I know that this may not be the right time to add to the criticism you are receiving over some of your policies, but maybe you could use some of my suggestions to get things back on track and improve your image at the same time.
I believe that special consideration should be given to all Mexicans in the United States, those that are there legally and those that are there without documentation. We must remember that it was the Mexicans who won WWII. My greatest concern is all the rhetoric that I've heard about the Social Security system failing. That worries me, but I have an idea that will guarantee that the SSA could meet its obligations for the next forty years at least.
You must remind the administrators of the Social Security system of that fact that this organization, when it was created, was suppose to be like a Christmas club. If you did not contribute to the fund, then you could not get benefits. Today however, there are people who go to the USA when they are old; and even though they have never worked a day in their lives in the USA, these people sometimes gets more money from the system than those who have contributed to the system.
I personally know of guys who have worked only a couple of years and go back to the States before they are even 60 years of age and claim disabilities and get big money every month.

Barbaret’s falling out

The foreigners at the meeting were concerned more with the aftermath of the incident and the scapegoat of foreigners in the local media. Several people raised concerns that both Roatan TV stations, run by Spanish speaking staff, have accused Kelcy Warren, an American owner of Barbaret, of ordering or personally killing the Helen island youth. "I was frightened of what Roberto [Romero] was saying and how far he was inciting the people," said Helen Murphy, an American living on Roatan, about a Channel 4 TV personality.
Channel 4 owner, Marco Galindo, agrees that the Barbaret coverage crossed a line: "These guys [Channel 4 personalities] are not very smart and when people call in, it makes a big commotion." While Galindo says that Channel 4 coverage is far from being journalism, he still gives his TV staff a wide degree of independence.
A different take on the matter had Congressman Jerry Hynds. "It was the Spanish media that took advantage of this. They [just] didn't want to say Spanish guys killed some black boys," said Congressman Hynds. "There was always a great rivalry between island people and Spanish people." As Bay Islands grow and the wealth gap amongst its residents widens, foreigners will likely play an active role in this "rivalry."
The death of three Helene Island youth in a boat ramming and the Spanish TVs coverage of the incident became the focus of the meeting at Coral Cay on June 6. Around 50 foreigners listened to the authorities' version of what took place and then voiced their concerns. "This was no accident. This was premeditated murder," said Congressman Hynds.
Congressman Hynds and Governor Thompson agreed that arrests were made swiftly and the judicial process was taking place as it should. Still, at least some Saint Helenians were leaving nothing to chance. "We have people who trace them, so the authorities just wouldn't let them go on the mainland," said Wally Bodden, Santos Guardiola councilman, about the three men arrested for ramming the Saint Helene boat.

Lobster Guilt

My boat alone maintains forty families. Someone said that he could tell that the diving business was not a success because there were no rich divers. If he had looked a little closer he would have found out that there are no rich dive boat owners either.
The ad writers, using fallacious information stirred up interest in the international community for the "plight" of the Miskito Indian and now the international concerns are pressuring the Honduran government to close the diving.
Few mention the accident rates in diamond mines, gold mines, the petroleum industry and the fishing industry throughout the world. One recent year, in the United States alone, 285 fishermen lost their lives doing their job, the bigger percentage of those deaths occurred in Alaska. Maybe some headlines should have read "Some one may have died to get you that king-crab dinner".
In one fourteen year period (1972-1986) there were 960 linemen killed in the United States and Canada, but I don't remember seeing any headlines that read, "Some one may have died to keep your lights on."
There is nobody more concerned with the health and welfare of the Miskito diver than a dive boat owner. After all, we are the ones that have to pay and one sick diver can set us back quite a bit and a dead diver can create a permanent burden with a packinghouse. My motto has always been "Bring my boat back empty before you bring me a sick diver" and I want to believe that these are the sentiments of all dive boat owners.
There is an inherent risk in SCUBA diving, whether it is for lobster, for oil exploration or for pleasure and there are also dangers and risks in many other lines of work but there has been and always will be individuals that are willing to chance the odds in order to feed their families.
Everything wrong with the lobster diving today was started by persons that got lucky and was able to get out of the business. Some of those people are under the impression that if the diving is closed the boats that fish lobster with divers are going to disappear. Well they are wrong; the dive boats will become direct competition for the trappers and their traps.
A few years ago some of those people went to great lengths to have the diving closed and those same people went so far as to publish ads in foreign newspapers with such phrases as "Someone may have died to get you that lobster dinner". Those people are supposed to be concerned with the health and welfare of the Miskito Indians. These international concerns seem to overlook the fact that tens of thousands have died and are still dying in coal mine accidents around the world. Maybe some headlines should read "Someone may have died to keep you warm this winter." While those people were writing and paying thousands of dollars for ads, the dive boat owners were and still are feeding all the people of the whole Mosquitia.

The Evil Amongst Us

The virus is present in all the bodily fluids of the infected person and during sexual contact it gains access to the uninfected person's blood stream through openings in the mucous membrane and through breaks in the skin.
HIV is a human retrovirus and once it has accessed the blood stream it then enters the human cells by binding to receptor proteins on the surface of human immune-cells (T cells). The virus then uses the cell's reproductive mechanisms to replicate itself as many times as it can before the cell dies. With the virus (HIV) using the cell's reproductive devices the immune cell cannot reproduce itself and over a period of time the immune-cell (CD4) count will drop from 1000 in a healthy person to 200 or less (per microliter of blood) in an infected person and this is when the full blown symptoms of AIDS appears.
With the continued depletion of the body's immune CD4-T cells, the immune systems will be unable to defend the body against any of 25 or so opportunistic diseases, any combination of which could be fatal. In spite of people's fear of being near an infected person, no evidence exists that link HIV transmission to casual contact with an infected person such as a handshake, hugging, or kissing on the skin, or even sharing dishes or bathroom facilities.
The HIV virus cannot exist for extended periods when exposed to the normal environment so you cannot pick it up from surfaces like you can with bacteria and other viruses like the ones that cause the common cold. During the last few years, this disease has become rampant among the inhabitants of this country, and it is now invading the islands. It is known that almost one hundred percent of the cases on these islands are attributed to unprotected sexual contact. To avoid contracting this virus, the safest thing to do is to "hold on to what you've got" and keep your loving at home and most importantly abstain from causal sex.
Most people still believe that AIDS is a venereal disease but I guess most medical persons would categorize it as a disease of the blood. AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This virus gains entry in the blood stream by intimate sexual contact with an infected person and contact with contaminated blood.The early years after the discovery and identification of the HIV virus, the carriers of this virus were marked as persona non-grata in nearly every place the disease appeared. Even today, the social stigma placed on a person carrying this virus is still a very real part of an infected person's life.
Ignorance of the well defined modes of transmission and fear of becoming infected by the ordinary means reserved for other contagious diseases have sometimes led to complete rejection of anyone known to be infected and on occasions to violence against infected persons.
The original idea that AIDS was an evil disease was probably because of its early prevalence among prostitutes and homosexual men. A prominent politician was said to have remarked to the press that "if the disease is left alone it will become a blessing to mankind by eliminating the less desirable elements of our society", namely the prostitutes and the homosexuals. During this first encounter with the virus it was called GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease) but soon after this then real illness was discovered in populations groups outside the gay community. The name was changed to its present form; "Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome."

Jesus & Judas

The arguments for the resurrection are weak and could be classified as merely hearsay. Jesus predicted his death and placed great emphasis on his resurrection because the latter event would prove without a doubt that He was the long awaited messiah. His crucifixion was witnessed by all of Jerusalem but the resurrection, the single most important event on which the Christian faith is based, went without witnesses.
Our knowledge of the resurrection is based solely on the testimony of a few of his followers, the people he had to convince of his claim to be the Son of God. On that Sunday even Mary Magdalene did not recognize Him. He had only been in that sepulchre for about thirty-six hours. Mary Magdalene confused Him with the gardener (John 20:15) until he spoke in a special voice. He also had to use His special voice to convince Simon. Unfortunately Christ did not survive the ordeal on the cross: that gesture of mercy by that insignificant roman soldier was the reason why.
I'm not sure if the Gospel of Judas is important. There are about thirty other gospels written in about the same time period that go unmentioned in our bible. Judas has always been categorized as the villain in the Jesus story. Judas was the true friend and also the confidant of Jesus. There was only one person that could have saved Jesus from execution and that was Jesus himself.
On the occasion of his first day in the hands of the chief priest when asked if He was the Son of God, he answered them: Ye say that I am, (Luke 22:70). That expression can be translated into something like: if you say so! That is a wise crack in any language.
Judas Iscariot committed suicide but it was not because of a guilty conscience, it was from sorrow and grief because he had lost his best friend and that was not supposed to happen. We will just have to wait and see what affect these book and movie revelations will have on our beliefs. I must agree with Tom Hanks who, in the tradition of Yogi Berra, said: "You gonna believe what you gonna believe.
Every time I turn on the TV these days there is someone discussing the DaVinci Code book, or the recently made public Gospel of Judas. There are pros and cons to both these two stories. The pros are usually the writers, the discoveries and investigators. The cons are every Christian denomination in existence, with the most vociferous being the Roman Catholics. The only thing that can be said for the DaVinci Code is that it is a fanciful idea and a well put-together piece of fiction.
There are many ideas of what could have happened to Christ after crucifixion. Some have Him surviving and some have Him being survived by his wife and daughter. Both of these ideas are based on suppositions and/or information from sources other that the bible in circulation today.
If anyone would read the New Testament carefully and without any preconceived ideas you will find that there is a lot of evidence that Jesus Christ of Nazareth perished on the cross. According to one account, on the day of His crucifixion when it came time for Him to "die" Jesus uttered: "It is finished." He then bowed his head and gave up the ghost. In this same account His followers requested of the soldiers not to break his limbs to hasten death, as was the custom. Then without warning a roman soldier thrust a lance into the side of Jesus Christ. This wound was not a part of the established procedure and it was the coup de grace for the crucified and weakened Jesus. Jesus died.

Wages of Sin

It is said that Jesus Christ came to earth to save mankind from sin, but the sentence was never repealed and man must still die before he can have eternal life.
According to some beliefs every person is considered a sinner from the moment of conception, or at least from the second we are born. This in itself is a great injustice. Adam was condemned without a trial by a jury of his peers and was denied the benefit of proper legal counsel. Even an inept public defender would have yelled entrapment. The real culprit of this case was not Adam, or Eve. The perpetrator of this crime (sin) was Satan.
On the day Lucifer was created, God must have left his crystal ball at home, because God apparently did not look too clearly at the future and did not know what lay ahead for mankind. If God did know what was going to happen, then I don't think that He should be credited with all that love and all mercifulness.
I always hear preachers yelling about. I believe that for that one crime (eating the fruit) there should have been no more than one punishment doled out. Death alone would have been punishment enough for that little crime.
If the judge was not satisfied with making death the wages of sin, He should have said "the wages of sin is death and mosquitoes" this most certainly would have been enough of a sentence.
Now that we have enough people to form a proper jury I'm calling for a retrial of Adam and Eve and I want to have a couple of Jewish lawyers on their side of the table. Satan must be brought in as a material witness and by his very nature he should be considered a hostile witness. Because he was the inventor of lies and deceit everything he says must be taken with a grain of salt. We must have the original judge sit at this new trial but the judge must be warned that the jury alone will decide whether to convict or to acquit the defendants.
If the defendant is acquitted the old sentence must be repealed and it must be retroactive back through time, and all those that have died because of sin must live again. If we win this case and Adam is acquitted, it will prove that the great one is not infallible and I will go on to demand some democratic changes in the dictatorial system of government that has held power in heaven for so long.
Somewhere in the bible it is written that the wages of sin is death. This would imply that those that do not sin will not die, but we all know that without exception death comes to us all. According to our only source of information we are all condemned to death because of a transgression that took place in the beginning of creation.
When the time comes to die it matters not what kind of person you have been throughout your life, but when that bell rings you must answer. Saint and sinner alike are gathered by the grim reaper and then they are placed side by side in the tomb with no distinction of rank or social order. Death has been an accepted part of life for ages, but it was not a part of living until after the original sin.
When Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden he was taken by the hand and led to a tree that would have gone unnoticed among the thousands of other trees that filled the garden. Adam was then warned that this one particular tree was not to be touched and the fruit there of was not to be eaten. While God instructed Adam, the devil must have been within ear-shot and devil, overheard everything that was told to Adam. Later on, devil would talk Eve into taking a bite of that forbidden fruit. This 'unimportant event' is documented as the first sin and it was that sin that ruined everything, not only for Adam and Eve, but for all the rest of mankind forever.

Instrospective

Democracy- Honduran Style

Every body knows that in this country we vote strictly according to tradition.
You might ask why is it then that in a specific area, the party that's in power during an election can end up losing that election..... /December 2005/

A Mother's Love

Many years ago on a small farm on the island of Bonnaco a small boy lay very ill and though he was being tended to by his loving grandmother the labored breathing of the child was a sure indication that without the proper medication this child would die..... /June 2005/

A City In Decline

A few days ago an article in a newspaper caught my eye. The article had to do with the economic situation of La Ceiba. The paper mentioned how the city no longer has any industries or any factories of consequence..... /January 2004/

The Missing Button

In a previous edition of this magazine, I wrote an article about my present-day beliefs in Christ and Christianity. However, I was not always of this persuasion..... /January 2004/
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