About 1,000 days ago, Irene and John Michalski were sipping coffee on their front porch in northeastern Wisconsin and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.
They were financially comfortable after a quarter-century of successful farming and careful investments. Their two boys had graduated and gone off to city jobs. The Michalskis, both nearing 50, were, well, they were bored to death.
”I guess we could play golf and bridge for the next 25 years,” John said. Irene, horrified, cried, ”No way!” Thus began their conversion to a new life as Peace Corps volunteers.
Today, after more than two years at it, they`ve jumped into their born-again existence with enthusiasm and a fresh appreciation of how the rest of the world works.
In fact, working with volunteers young enough to be their children near this remote little town deep in the mountains of southwestern Honduras, the Michalskis have learned much about themselves as well, and that makes them wonder, as Irene says, ”whether we ever want to move back to Sturgeon Bay again.”
There is nothing at all Pollyannaish about the Michalskis and their young colleagues here. The routine is too arduous for starry-eyed geewhizzery about bringing civilization to the noble savages. It`s basic, small-scale, practical stuff: breeding rabbits, planting apple trees, teaching classes, battling Third World bureaucracy, building aqueducts and irrigation dams.
Yet what`s quickly apparent is that these Americans can lay claim to being the best and brightest of the post-yuppie generation. Somehow they have managed to avoid becoming snared in the complicated fussiness and hard-driving consumer chic of much of contemporary U.S. life. Judging from their hard work and easy, jovial camaraderie, they`re also managing to have a heck of a good time.
If this is Shangri-La, it is a Honduran version, one characterized by poverty, disease and illiteracy in a harsh but breathtakingly beautiful mountain setting. Honduras is the original banana republic (the big banana plantations are to the north), with a history of economic exploitation that has left it wretchedly poor and heavily reliant on U.S. aid. The assistance comes in many forms, including the largest Peace Corps contingent in the world.
The numbers-about 330 volunteers, including 80 aspirantes who will be washed out if they fail during three months of initial training-are not especially important.
What it`s all about here is a singularly individual thing: individual effort, frustration, joy over small victories. It is a baby`s life saved, a row of corn properly planted, a new pipe gushing much-needed fresh water, the sudden dawning in a Honduran campesino`s face that some new ways are better than the old ones.
All of that was much on Shelly Finnell`s mind one recent morning as she stood in a mountain clearing near a clutch of stunted children whose smiles revealed rotten teeth. The scene was thousands of miles and a couple of centuries of social development away from the University of California, where she studied agricultural economics.
”What do I do here?” she mused. ”Campus life, dating, nightclubs, that all seems far away. What I do is what there is to do. I take long walks through . . . this.” And she pointed.
The Cordillera Opalaca mountain range is at its least lovely in this, the waning of the dry season. Yet it is the stuff of wonder. The sun filters in a soft, dappled glow through the pines dotting the slopes high above. Broad, winding valleys undulate away into the hazy distance. The wind sifts gently, like a whispery harp, through the pines and across the clearing. It is very quiet.
It is also extremely dry. That`s where the dams and aqueducts fit in.
And that`s why, up at the end of a lonesome trail, 10 bone-jarring miles by jeep into the mountain wilderness on this sunny morning, a bunch of sturdy young men are building a dam.
The Hoover Dam it isn`t. Rather, as Steve Scott points out, it`s pretty primitive: two walls of logs about 3 feet apart are anchored in the bed of a mountain stream, a thick plastic wrap is tucked between them and the gap is filled with dirt shoveled down by other Peace Corps volunteers on a rise just above.
The stream, never strong, dribbles down to a trickle. Upstream, a reservoir slowly starts to fill up with moisture for corn and other crops that could otherwise not survive.
Scott, a young giant of a man with a sweaty red bandanna tied around his head, is all over the place. He shouts, exhorts, shovels, tamps dirt down, splooshes in the water and laughs like a loon as the dam starts coming together.
What`s he so exuberant about? A little old dam at the edge of nowhere?
Cadging a cigarette, he bursts out, ”Hey, man, you know? This is . . . this is something real!”
That`s the rude essence of it. Steve Scott builds dams. Irene Michalski breeds rabbits, and Mark Nelson builds hutches for them. John Michalski plants apple trees and inoculates pigs and cows. Ann Hoganson agonizes over her adult-education classes. Michigan-born Jeff Ratcliffe signed on for an extra year because he couldn`t bear to leave his aqueducts unfinished. Shelly Finnell is passionately interested in building a factory to process potatoes. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing in the stories these people tell about how they wound up in the Honduran boondocks is that they don`t consider it extraordinary at all. They say it`s just not that big a deal.
But if small is beautiful, what`s happening here is a very big deal indeed.
Ratcliffe, who looks a little like a junior version of the Marlboro Man, grew up in Remus, Mich., and studied political science at Northern Michigan University. He never dreamed that one day he would spend his days concerned with gravity flow, water-borne disease, topography and the size of pipes. He is building two aqueducts that, if he solves a myriad of technical problems, will serve 2,000 people for the next 20 years.
Exactly what led him to the Peace Corps is unclear. But his interest in what he`s doing, though haltingly expressed, couldn`t be clearer.
”I had some experience working in construction,” he said. ”I left a lot of unfinished projects, and I don`t want to do that here. But trying to get people to change their ways, I don`t know, I run into a lot of obstinacy. . . .
”When I decided to come here, my friends were all behind it. Nobody thought I was being foolish. I started out in the mental-health program, and the doctors at the health center where I worked turned me on to the need for better sanitation; so basically I found my own specialty. Listen, water and sanitation are a big thing for the Hondurans. This is important.”
Finnell`s story is much the same but with an added economic gloss. Working only with a pocket calculator since her arrival last June, she studies potential markets for new crops, price fluctuations, such arcane matters as solar drying of vegetables-and potatoes.
”Prices fluctuate so much, and farmers here keep such poor records, that it`s tough to figure out which new projects are feasible,” she said. ”I talk to the import-export people, who seem mostly interested in producing high-priced vegetables such as asparagus for export, but look what you could do with dehydrated potatoes! You could make soup! French fries! There`s flour!” Her point, an issue deeply felt by virtually every Peace Corps volunteer interviewed here, is that most Hondurans in this aridly beautiful region eke out a cruel, miserable existence. They are undernourished to the point of starvation, uneducated, unfamiliar with even the most rudimentary ways to salvage some dignity from their lives.
For Irene and John Michalski, the most important thing is for them to eat better. Irene, who serves as a sort of wry, benign den mother for the Peace Corps contingent in La Esperanza (which means ”hope”), notes incredulously that toward the end of the dry season, the local diet is reduced to corn tortillas. Period.
”I just couldn`t believe it when we got here 2 1/2 years ago,” she said. ”These poor people . . . they take plastic jugs up into the mountains to fetch water, and their houses are empty. No furniture. They sleep on the ground. There was this girl who was hit by a car, and she had 35 stitches put in her face by the light of a Coleman lantern. Unbelievable.”
On this particular day, with her husband an eight-hour mule ride away in the mountains planting apple trees, Irene Michalski tended her rabbits. When it comes to rabbits, the woman may be a near-genius, and what she has in mind is nothing less than leapfrogging centuries of nutritional deprivation among Honduras` rural populace.
Starting with a small band of rabbits purchased from a government cooperative, Michalski has developed about 40 clusters of hutches across the countryside. Rabbits being what they are and doing what they do, their numbers are increasing geometrically, providing a fresh source of protein for a group of campesinos who are so chronically undernourished that most of their children (precise statistics are not available) die young.
Her comrade in arms is Mark Nelson, 26, a gentle Minnesotan and expert carpenter who devised a way to use local materials for hutches that cut their cost from $150 to about $5, the cost of the nails.
All this does not surprise Peter Stevens, the 58-year-old Peace Corps director for Honduras, an ex-marine from Connecticut who has been with the agency since 1971 in Guatemala, Venezuela and Colombia as well as Honduras.
”We`ve pretty much broken away from the generalists with a B.A. degree who predominated in the early years,” Stevens said in his office in Tegucigalpa, the capital. ”It`s gotten better. The average age of volunteers is 29, but we have a lot of older people-engineers, architects, fishery experts.
”They have to have a skill. If they come without one, we train `em. We had one beautiful guy from Chicago, Vincent Mayer, a carpenter, 81 years old. Do you believe that? He worked two years in Belize, and he was in better shape than I am.”
Jim Flanigan, a Peace Corps spokesman in Washington, agreed that
”there`s a touch of gray in the Peace Corps these days.” The 5,200 volunteers around the world average 30 years in age, he said, and there are no plans to change the trend as the agency prepares to follow a congressional mandate to nearly double its size to 10,000 volunteers by 1992.
The Peace Corps budget, $146.2 million in fiscal 1988, is increasing by about $10 million a year. Credit for its resurgence after several years of tepid management generally is given to Loret Miller Ruppe, a former Reagan-Bush political organizer in Michigan who has been director since 1981.
Ruppe, the agency`s longest-serving director, has visited all 64 countries where the Peace Corps maintains a presence. One of her daughters was a volunteer in Nepal.
How has the Peace Corps changed since the heady early days of the Kennedy administration?
”Well, they still have some stars in their eyes, but there`s a heavy dash of realism now,” Flanigan commented. ”There`s a wide gamut of special skills: engineers, special-education teachers, foresters and nutritionists.
”Know-how is what we need, people with special skills. And it`s simply a fact that older people win respect more readily in many countries. These are the people who realize that grass-roots solutions gained from experience can pay off in big results.”
Yet among the volunteers, for all their enthusiasm, there is a certain bittersweetness when thoughts turn to the lives they left behind in the United States. Echoing the words of many of her colleagues, Irene Michalski commented:
”You feel out of touch. It`s good to see the U.S. at a distance, though; you realize how materialistic people are. Even poor people have a lot more. What`s important there is not important here. These people just want to stay alive.
”The most important thing I think we`ve learned here is how another culture lives and thinks. Americans are totally unaware; they have no idea. Sure, we have frustrations-who wants to wait hours for a bus to come by?
”But I have no regrets. I love it. It`s the smartest thing John and I ever did.”
And she excused herself to go tend her rabbits.
