ON A BIKE IN EL PROGRESO

El Progreso is a Bike city. Or so it used to be until cars became something people could afford to buy and operate. Bikes passed along the same routes as the trans-national railroad that carried bananas from the interior farms, through the banana camps and to the Caribbean for export. People needed Bikes to traverse the sprawl created by this railroad. But the bananas no longer make foreign investors rich, and the railroad only left its tracks in a median of a road west of town. The first car came to El Progresso in the late 1940s and had to be put on a covered barge that was pulled by hand across a river. And now, with gas prices soaring, people are resurrecting their mountain, banana seat, road, shock proof, and trick Bikes instead of paying 65 Lempiras (roughly $3.75) per gallon.

Thus, Bikes here are used like cars; their size, lack of enclosure, and balancing act hindering only the gringa. Bikes pull carriages full of food for the day’s sales. Bikes push cages full of bottled water. Bikes balance with coolers and buckets in the front metal basket or the back wooden crates. Bikes sport an extra seat or two short metal pipes attached to the back wheel brace for a friend or child. Bikes blast a boom box with advertisements and the week’s most popular reggeaton song. Bikes roll with pieces of small furniture or clutters of squawking chickens. Bikes carry nearly an entire family to work, school and home. And, my favorite, Bikes offer an open air location for a brief romantic date—the men in their sleek trousers and shined shoes ride on the seat, and the women in their tight jeans, slinky blouses, and stiletto heals balance side saddle on the cross bar, never loosing their balance or catching their beautiful shoes on a curb or in a puddle, while the men reach around them to hold the handles. This gives the lovers a rare moment of privacy from bustling homes often full of more than 3 generations. The man can whisper gently to his lady and she can hold his hand as he steers. For the desperately in love (and very brave), the girl can turn around and kiss her gentleman as he drives.

I have one of these amazing contraptions, though I have yet to try anything more than riding it, as that seems challenging enough at the moment. I bought my Bike for 350 Lempiras, which stopped my breathing for a moment, until my mental calculator kicked in and I figured that was only about $18. My Bike does not have multicolored tassels whipping around the handles as I ride or a grand white banana seat or a shiny red paint job, but the $18 was worth my independence. My Bicycle is a simple Bike with a skinny frame and wheels. It is dusty black with a wide, plastic covered seat and curved metal handles with hand brakes. Thankfully it has rusty wheel guards to protect my backside from rebounding water and mud splashes. Unfortunately, it does not have a chain guard. So each day, to the oh-she-is-such-a-gringa chuckles of my host family members and all the guys at the theatre, I role up my right pant leg, to just below my knee, and head off on my Bike. The ride is about 15 minutes one way, and I get to ride it four times a day with my host brother, Wilson, since I return home for siesta each day. Progreso is a “mezcla” or mix of the old and the new, the rural and the city all mashed like Thanksgiving potatoes together in one town. On my way, this is what I see:

First, after Jafet, Wilson’s son, raises his arm and counts to three like one of the Pink Ladies during the car race in Grease, we head down the hill outside my home, dodging the chickens and the group of children clad only in dusty diapers and mom’s old Van Halen t-shirt, already immersed in a game of hopscotch or arguing whose turn it is to be “it.” We turn right bumping and bobbing around over stones and huge potholes and peddle hard up a little hill rounding the corner to the left. Here the street becomes paved and we bump over the line from casual barrio to civilized downtown. On my left is a two story pop top home painted unabashedly in alternating pink and purple, conjuring images of chalky Valentine’s Day candy embossed with the general statement of “be mine.”

Across the street is the closest “pulperia” to our house called Pulperia Mi Tia. Pulperias are Honduran Mom and Pop stores. They are built in the front part of someone’s home with a Dutch door guarded by a security door of barred metal. Pulperias have anything one could possibly need in a moments notice, including crates of eggs, bread, milk, pop, three kinds of bananas, candy, potato chips, corn flour for tortillas and full chickens—live with feathers or killed and plucked. They have toiletries like diapers, soap, and toilet paper, and pharmacy products for your head, stomach, throat, and skin. Everyone buys from the pulperias since walking or riding anywhere downtown after about 7pm is too dangerous.

A short block more and we turn right onto the main thoroughfare that will take us through the middle of downtown. First, I must dodge around two giant speed bumps so as not to run into the cars but also not hit the curb. Even after a month here, these bumps make me cringe, for if they are taken too fast I will bounce off or topple my Bike. We pass, on the left, a small ranch raising sheep with matted wool the color of the dry earth they are scouring for any ounce of left over grass or hay. On the right, is a lumber yard that uses horses and open-back carriages, right out of Sarah, Plain and Tall to deliver its planks to waiting customers. Next door, sits a cable station offering Cartoon Network, ESPN and HBO to the avid TV watchers of Progreso. After this is the furniture maker, who, out of a few planks of wood, sheets of foam, and slightly outdated patterned fabric, is able to build plush couches and armchairs, all in a shack the size of a one-car garage.

After about 7 long blocks, we get to the first stop light which marks our entrance into downtown. Here is where Wilson, in the midst of all the traffic, begins to see and be seen by all his friends and acquaintances around town. The official cool greeting by anyone familiar is a honk of the car horn and a call out of the person’s name and then a big thumbs up held high in the air for a minimum of 7 seconds to be sure the person saw you and knows that you are still, indeed, cool buddies. I giggle each time I see this, as Wilson is quite macho, but the gesture quite Bush-esque.

At this stoplight, we scoot ahead of the line of waiting cars, to avoid the row of buses parked along the curb waiting to enter the bus terminal—an old gutted warehouse with only the support beams and roof left over. Buses in town are made in factories built and organized by US school bus companies, so their bright yellow bodies and falsely comfortable-looking benches are that of any public school system in North America. The drivers of these buses get to decorate their own bus, since they are also the owners, and I’m sure there is a very lucrative company somewhere in Honduras that specializes in the painting of multicolored dragons, flames and silhouettes of naked women, since these seem to be the design of choice around Progreso. Drivers also plaster their favorite praise God slogans, familial inside jokes, and names of wives, girlfriends, children and grandchildren on the windows. The only way I can tell the bus of Jose, my host dad, is to read the driver or rear windows which proudly display the names of his two grandchildren in bubbly, graffiti-like lettering.

On the left, beneath a metal awning, sit rows of shoe-shiners on small wood boxes. Their customers arrive with the 8 o’clock hour; those men who work as salesmen, storeowners, and bankers, priding themselves in this sparkle at their feet after trekking from their respective barrios in the dust. Once they glow, these men stop at the small table past the awning to buy the daily paper—more to read about yesterday’s futbol games than the news.

We cross over to this side of the street, by the church of Las Mercedes because here stands a giant corrugated metal fence, behind which one of the city’s central parks is being renovated, and next to which no cars can park. This gives us a nice pause to ride without the fear of running into an opening car door or a taxi pulling out of a parking space, and a chance to glance back to see the church where Fr. Jack says mass, standing simple and white above the reflective shield.

We continue on, and on both sides of the street it is only possible to see giant, primary colored beach umbrellas, so densely lining the sidewalks and curbs that one cannot even see the original stores. It is as though these street venders with T-shirts, fruits, and lottery tickets have tried to create a beachy Caribbean boardwalk, in order to forget that there is no sand, only dust, and no salty ocean, only mop water run-off.

On the next block on the left, where there stands a No Parking sign, is parked a pickup with its bed loaded with one red and one yellow volcano of leechee nuts, towering over the height of the cab. By 5pm when I return this route, each and every one of those fruits will be sold to hungry shop keepers, whiny sticky children, stiletto clad travel agents, tilting old men and students looking for a snack between classes.

Then we reach the fruit, cheese and fish market on the right, where the same bananas, radishes, cabbage, onions, carrots, pineapple, and apples are sold by every vendor, trying to convince buyers that their products are better than his neighbors. There are the cheese stands with sales boys who loiter around the un-refrigerated glass display cases full of blocks of hard cheese the size of television sets and the women who sit on the plastic crates next to great baskets of dried sardines and shrimp. The smell of old fish and rotting milk in the noon sun can be enough to knock me off my Bike, but daily at lunch and dinner time there are swarms of customers picking out their meal as though it were McDonald’s.

Interspersed in this bazaar-like atmosphere, peak small stores, with names like “Tiara Princess” or “Curiosities and More” selling Adidas and Puma logoed shirt, shoes just waiting to be scuffed and re-shined, and pants ready to be plastered on to any sized woman. Stores for cell phones, big screen TVs and internet dot the next two blocks, also competing for this developing country to develop its technology.

After these blocks, we reach the block with three banks, all guarded by two army fatigued and armed men. No one goes to the bank alone, even the most built of men, as just outside in broad daylight wait men who will defy the guard and try, and often succeed, to steal any precious Lemipra just withdrawn.

Finally through the center of town, we wait for the second stop light, and pass the line of people waiting outside of what was once a health clinic and is now a welfare office. Every day of the week, the line stands about twenty deep; people waiting to be paid by a government who is waiting to be paid by long retracted investments. Always nearby wait two men in wheelchairs with cardboard boxes placed where their legs used to be, trying to sell advertising slots on their wheelchairs to anyone that will listen.

Then we pass my favorite building—a giant warehouse whose sole job is to make bread. The owners have smartly installed fans that push the aroma of sugar, butter and flour out into the humid, polluted air, sweetening the sourness for just a moment. I inhale deeply each day, earning another “strange gringa” look, and conjure up days of driving past Entemen’s Bakery on Evans with mom, both of us trying to use our noses to taste the warm bread within, and sighing once the smell faded.

Finally we get to the Highway, which is a two lane street divided by a median—more like Happy Canyon than I-25. We wait for the one car to pass another and take a quick racer turn and the driver who thought it would be easier to drive the wrong way on one side of the road, so that he didn’t have to drive an extra block, and then we cross, bumping once again onto potholed dirt roads. We make a competition out of who can choose the most cratered path, and still hit the least bumps, balancing the Bikes along the crater walls.

We turn left past the medical clinic with the four men that sit out side and “tsk tsk” at the gringa every single day, even though I have been here a month. We take another left, and the air cools a bit, the trees and bushes thicken. We enter a canopy of vegetation: mango trees, bougainvillea vines, palm trees, and flowery bushes. Tucked away in coolness and fresh breezes away from downtown, up a bumpy cement path, sits a wooden building, its signage reads, Teatro La Fragua.

On my Bike I have traveled back to the past of the banana camps and fruit companies. From the colonias and barrios of the banana camps, through the center of town attempting to catapult itself into the 21^st century, and back again to an old wooden building originally built as a dance hall for the United Fruit Company owners, I have seen the last century pass before my eyes in 15 minutes on my Bike.

GABI

Gabi does not live in my house. But, she belongs somewhere amongst the leaves of this family, closer to the bottom of the knotted tree with generations of branches and off-shoots rising above her. At 10 years old, Gabi has already discovered her ancient spirit, hidden beneath the dust and poverty of life here. Her other family members fight with their spouses, carry guns to their jobs in case they get robbed, or verbally abuse their children and try to compensate with a trip to Burger King. One might say these problems are exactly why Gabi is such an old soul, having had to ‘grow up too fast.’ But each moment I listen to her and watch her patient face in the midst of the chaos, I gasp in amazement at her ability to quietly but strongly overcome such forces, like Clara in The House of the Spirits, more one with wise spirits than earthly creatures.

Gabi carries herself like a woman. A small, daffodil yellow skirt rests on her tiny hips and displays her long strong legs used for futbol at school, but for carrying food and children at home. Her flip-flops are slightly falling apart at the toe piece, but her narrow feet grasp them tightly, revealing not an ounce of weakness as she gracefully floats through the house going about her business. Her woven tank top does not betray her by showing a hint of her coming puberty, but instead fits perfectly on her small shoulders, as though to prove to any critic, that whatever might come her way, she already has the power and the poise to deal with it.

Gabi’s chin angles like the women in the paintings of _______, with no sign of baby fat leading up to her Fay Dunaway cheekbones. Her full, heart lips painted by nature with milk chocolate and raspberries, don’t emit whines or complaints, but hold conversations about movies and languages and family. From the front, her nose displays her family heritage, short and wide, but in her profile turning up slightly, it reveals her innocent pride. A dark patience fills her almond shaped eyes, always aware of her own surroundings, but never conscious of her own self-confidence. Her hair, dark and long, falls among her shoulders in layers, coyly covering parts of her face each time she turns her head or laughs. When it’s too hot, without missing a beat as she hustles through the house to a crying cousin, she pulls her hair into a ponytail, almost perfect for her high school dances, still seven years off.

She eats her dinner of hard cheese, refried beans, and fried tortillas. Her slender fingers crack the tortilla and scoop the beans, two fingers on the tortilla and her thumb on the beans, exactly as her mother and grandmother do, without even a glance towards the lonely fork at her place setting. Her remaining two fingers rise up slightly with womanly charm, as though she were holding her first glass of champagne. When her cousins gripe for a bite, she delicately breaks her prepared piece in half and as a mother would, feeds the food into the toddlers open mouth.

Her voice, raspy and deep, like a mix of Lauren Bacall and Katherine Hepburn, truly reveals her ancient soul—the voice of a mother, sister, lover, and friend, but never a child. When I hear her during dinner, I am certain I have not been left alone to eat in silence, but am accompanied by a long lost friend who genuinely asks me how I’ve been and what I did today. She giggles with an airy breath that builds into a hoarse chuckle when I can’t understand her Spanish, and then proceeds to explain the misunderstood words, using varieties of English and Spanish vocabulary. Gabi never uses this voice to shout or whine, unlike the rest of her relatives, both adults and children. If she needs something, she simply gets it herself. If one of her cousins screams ridiculous demands about food and toys, she, without a word, silences them by a toss of her hand and a look of “please, I know your games.”

When I hear this voice from my upstairs lonely bedroom or calling my name on a street where I didn’t think I knew anyone, I feel a bit more content in this strange place; a bit like I have a tiny friendly spirit guiding me along the way.

The only thing revealing Gabi’s age: she left my house tonight at 7:30 to go home to bed. She has more 4^th grade tomorrow.


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