Beginning to Notice Things

I’ve always loved the first sight and impressions of a country.  I always look out the window as I leave the airport to see what types of cars people drive, what colors the shops are painted, if there are people on the streets, what the advertising looks like, everything.  It is all new and unknown and holds clues to what the country is like.

San Pedro Sula is different and similar to other places I’ve seen.  The side streets look like those of the pueblos in Mexico, the larger buildings and malls look like what I saw in Caracas.  It’s cleaner than a lot of other countries I’ve been to.  The streets are almost devoid of trash and I’ve seen signs urging people to keep them that way.  There are beautiful green mountains on the west side of the city and malls scattered throughout.  These malls seem to be where most of the life of the city takes place (since it certainly isn’t out on the streets).

One of the first things I heard about San Pedro Sula was that it was dangerous. I heard this even before I was offered this position but am now starting to see what it means.  It means security guards with shotguns outside most restaurants and stores and avoiding walking around at night.  It means that people go to malls because they can have guards on the outside and everything else inside.  My house shares a walled courtyard with two other houses and we have a security guard that wanders around with his german shepherd.  I don’t think he carries a gun though.  The place also has an alarm system but we don’t use it.

But, I wonder, how dangerous is this place really?  The people talk about how unsafe it is but they don’t act like they did in Venezuela.  No one is darting across streets to their cars at night and no one carries old cell phones in case someone asks that they give theirs up at a stoplight. Let's investigate: comparing Caracas, San Pedro Sula, and Baghdad.

Caracas

San Pedro Sula

Baghdad

According to the Observatorio Centroamericano sobre Violencia and aggregated by Wikipedia (I really just spot checked the numbers on the PDFs), Honduras ranks just after El Salvador in homicides per capita (worldwide) and Venezuela comes in at 4^th.  As for city rates, I find the district of San Pedro Sula to be at around 92 compared to Caracas’s figure of 200.  That 200 number I was unable to find in an official study but if it’s good enough for the New York Times, it’s good enough for me.

I guess all that research makes me feel better.  I’m about twice as safe here as I was in Caracas.  But, that still puts me in twice as much danger as I would be in Baghdad.  Hmm.  And, this all means that I am in 20 times the danger as when I’m in the US.  Double hmm.  I do find the Caracas comparison to be the most salient but won't trivialize such a serious problem.

 

On an unrelated note, it looks like my role will be wider in scope than I thought.  We’re responding to a large USAID request that looks really exciting.  I’m reading through 80 pages or so of it tomorrow.  Today I read up on the Manual de Produccion de la Papa.