Author: Stephanie Deutsch, Smaller World Volunteer

It was our first morning in La Majada, a tiny village in the mountains of Honduras, and we were walking with our local guides from the one-room, cinderblock schoolhouse up a steep, verdant hill to visit Don Virgilio Hernandez, an elderly man in a wide hat with a warm, almost toothless grin, and Noé, a young farmer proud of the radishes he had raised using newly learned organic farming techniques. We passed several tiny adobe cottages with red tiled roofs, a simple chicken coop, and a concrete outdoor sink with a washboard next to clothes hanging on a line. Everywhere there were chickens – roosters strutting and crowing, hens of all colors and sizes pecking the ground, shepherding scores of chicks. As I snapped a picture of the chickens, Gloria, the pretty young teacher with her own flock of young girls in uniform blue skirts and white blouses following the foreigners with interest, asked me, “Don’t you have chickens in your country?” Well, yes, I told her we do, but we don’t see them very much. We’re city people.

We're 14 women, 11 of us from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., visiting Honduras with Sustainable Harvest International. One might question how effective 14 middle-aged women, none of us farm girls, would be at advancing the mission of SHI, but there was another concept underlying the partnership – the idea that women enjoy relating to other women and that this natural affinity would, somehow, serve the missions of both organizations.

We visited two small villages near Trinidad, Honduras spending time working with SHI staff members on agricultural projects in the mornings, and visiting with the women of the villages in the afternoons. The agricultural work was, in a way, the easy part. We would help to create gardens on steep hillsides, mix dirt, ash, manure and yeast to create organic fertilizer, pot tiny seedlings for people in the villages to take home with them. We would follow directions. Spending time with the women was more of a challenge. Some in our group spoke little Spanish; conversation might not flow.

And since this time together had been our idea, we would be giving, not following, directions. We decided to focus our visits by inviting the women to do two craft projects with us – embellishing plain cloth tote bags with sewing, embroidery, fabric paint and appliqués, painting and decorating small, wooden picture frames. We took cameras and small printers to give each woman a picture of herself to put in the frames. Before heading to Honduras, we visited a local Spanish-speaking senior center to practice. The enthusiasm of the women there sent us on our way with high hopes.

We arrived in Honduras with not just our own backpacks and rolling suitcases, but with seven enormous bags bulging with frames, fabric, buttons, tote bags, glue, sewing kits, scissors, paint and materials to donate to the primary schools. By mid-week it was clear that the women in both villages were enjoying the projects. As our SHI guide had warned us, each afternoon there were more of them than there had been the day before. And it was not just women, of course, who flocked to the schoolhouses where we met. Each day there were men looking through the windows and children scampering everywhere.

On our last day in the villages, each of our groups attempted a conversation just with the women. Over the din of children playing outside, we gave simple information about ourselves – “Me llamo Stephanie; vivo en Washington, DC; soy casada; tengo tres niños” – and invited our new Honduran friends to do the same. Each group had one native speaker in it. The Hondurans were interested in what we did (we counted a priest, a teacher, a psycho-analyst and retired government workers among our number) and in the fact that we had, to their minds, so few children. They said they all voted, but they were not enthusiastic about their current mayor because he planned to eliminate a kindergarten class for lack of funding.

Our translators were kept busy facilitating the exchange, but none was needed when one of the women from our group, noting the lack of electricity in most of the village homes, innocently asked, “What do you do in the evenings in your villages when there is no light?” Without hesitation, all the women in the room began to laugh. There is much, much more to say and understand about each other, but a moment of shared laughter is surely a good place to start.

The way we work with Sustainable Harvest in the community is as a collective unit.  What this means is that we now help one another on our land, sharing ideas, harvests, successes and failures. From day to day and week to week, the groups of families perform rotations, whereby no one family plot is worked on more than twice in one week. During the planting and harvesting of crops, rotations are at their peak.