March 3, 2000

Is it a place, a people, or a pesky insect? I think it’s all three. Visiting the wilderness area on the Caribbean Coast had piqued my interest because of its relative inaccessibility. On Roatan I met someone from the Moskitia who was willing to take me into the tiny jungle village where her family lived. And so the adventure began. First, a one-hour flight from La Ceiba on a Russian 15 seat twin-prop plane to the village of Ahuas. Then a three-hour ride in a dugout canoe. (Ok, it did have a motor) Then finally, a thirty minute walk from the rivers edge, down a path to the village of Wawina.

My guide was Laura who is from a family of 13, most of them living in the same village and most of them on their way to having large families of their own. They live in small wooden houses built on stilts, one flight up from the ground level. Often there were two separate one room buildings; one for the kitchen and the other the communal bedroom.

The latrine was yet another small raised building. But it was several hundred yards away and shared by several families. No electricity, no running water. I was a long way from the Holiday Inn. Moskitia is one more thing; a language. It is spoken by everyone in the village, with Spanish spoken as a second language by a minority. Many of the breadwinners of the families traveled many hours each week to work someone else’s’ farmland only to return to their families for a day at a time. (Based on the size of their families they must be coming home for sex, but I still couldn’t figure out where they did it with so many people around and so little privacy.)

I attended an evangelical church service, tried iguana, and met most of Laura’s extended family. After two nights I was more than ready to head back to the relative comforts of the Third World.