Empty Streets, Missing Children

I walk zigzagging down the crooked cobbled streets of Tegucigalpa.

No street kids. Playing, shouting, shining shoes, walking with their parents.

None.

Here in the capital of Honduras, one of the youngest and poorest democracies in the western hemisphere, where the average income is about 30 dollars a month, no street kids? Not even beggars?

Doesn’t make sense.

Cornmeal covers the apron of a woman making tortillas. Another woman selling cigarettes sticks her hands out to me. When I shake my head, she raises her shirt, exposing her bare chest, and then jerks her chin toward an empty stairwell. I walk on.

Honduran soldiers armed with AK-47s brush past me, bumping against my shoulders when I don’t step aside. I give them a look, know enough to say “asshole!” in my mind only.

I’d just spent three months in Afghanistan. It was tough enough covering a war; it was even more difficult to transition back to the suburban sprawl of Kansas City, Missouri, where I live.

In place of desperate Afghan street beggars, I saw families arguing about which 80-dollar pair of sneakers to buy in malls. Instead of mud huts snuggled against barren foothills, skyscrapers blot out the sun. In place of rogue militia roadblocks and American military patrols roaring past with .50 calibers swinging left and right, community police officers wandered suburban byways issuing parking tickets. In place of women still forced to cover their bodies in body-length veils, billboards of nearly nude models leered at passing drivers.

My first week home, I came across a magazine article about Honduras. According to the article, street children were disappearing in Tegucigalpa. Perhaps they were being killed by police cracking down on gangs. By gangs fighting for turf. By vigilantes trying to control crime. No one knew.

Honduras sounded like a place I would understand. I fell asleep with the magazine on my chest and woke up the next morning with it still opened to the article, my partner Susan on the other side of the bed, mouth parted, eyes closed, the features of her upturned face abstract in the morning light. I listened to her steady breathing punctuate the intermittent creaks of the house and got up to make coffee and finish the article.

How long ago was that? Not long but now in Honduras it feels long as I stand here and wonder, where are the children?

* * *

Around a corner, about five blocks from my hotel, a sign sticks out above the sidewalk: Tobacco Road. Another smaller sign beneath it reads: For Backpackers.

Through a bright yellow gate, I see two fat orange cats lounging on a patio. A picnic table stands to one side. The swishing sound of a washing machine rises out of the shadows. To the left of the gate, a door opens to a bar.

“Hello!” I shout.

After a moment, a short potbellied man with white hair tied back in a small ponytail approaches, scowling. He wipes his hands on his green polo shirt, slaps them against his blue jeans.

“Saw your sign,” I say. “You get that from the Erskine Caldwell novel?”

“No,” he says, his face relaxing. “I never read the book. At one time Tegucigalpa was the halfway point on the route taken by merchants trading tobacco.”

He introduces himself. Tom. An expat from Miami. We shake hands. Tobacco Road, he explains, is a bar and hostel.

“I’ve assimilated into the country very nicely,” he says. “The hostel made good business sense. The backpackers are very happy, grateful for a place to stay. And then they’re gone and new people come in. I love the excitement of new people coming in here. It doesn’t have time to get old. Here I’m Peter Pan.”

He unlocks the gate and leads me into the bar. Half a dozen square wood tables fill the brown tile floor. Tall chairs with straw seats line the bar. Bright colorful paintings of local villages cover the wood-paneled walls. Red tile roofs. Green hills. Dirt roads. Several paintings of bare-breasted women...