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December 05, 2002
San Pedro Sula Dreams
I don’t remember where I was headed. Maybe it was to Trujillo, to the beach; maybe it was to the border then on to Guatemala. I remember having very few lempiras left, which either means I was waiting till I got to the bank in Trujillo, or trying to use them up so I could start afresh with quetzales in a few hours’ time.
It was a bus station I knew well, not least because of the hours that would pass between arriving on one bus and waiting for the next to leave. The bus would turn off the main road, and head through a residential zone before pulling into an oversized driveway. It was apparently quite near the city centre, or maybe just a bus company I wanted to use but could never find, but never felt any urge to explore. I’d arrive, buy a bottle of Fresca, find a chair to sit in and give my shoulders a well-earned rest from my rucksack. That would have been 1996. I’d returned my harp to its owner, and had gone to Mexico City a few weeks previously, so had probably already added a guitar to my load. Travelling semi-light.
I remember now. I’d returned to England partway through the summer for a family event, and was faced with approximately another month until I was due back at university. I still had my return ticket from Mexico to London, and at that time the fares to Honduras were thankfully cheap. I flew back to San Pedro Sula, the closest international airport to Trujillo, my favourite beach. In retrospect, I think that’s only relatively speaking: from the map of Honduras in my memory, Trujillo is the last coastal town before the impenetrable jungle mass of Mosquitia, aka the Mosquito Coast, as immortalised by Robert Holdstock and Harrison Ford. A few months previously, I had worked in Catacamas, the ‘frontier’ town on its southern edge.
So I sat there. Under the café’s canopy, near the front. Plastic chairs and tables, plastic colourful tablecloths. Even though I was sitting in the shade I only remember bright sunlight. How long did my Fresca last? How long did it stay cold? I don’t even remember how long I had to wait.
What I remember most strongly is Brown. The brown shade of the dirt of the bus terminal. A large square dusty brown expanse, with the browny-grey flooring of the café on one side. The afternoon sun playing across it, undisturbed by the non-arrival of buses. The other people in the café sat quietly; I was the only foreigner. Sometimes I pulled out my guide book to look at the town map, but then put it away again each time, unwilling to explore or leave the terminal.
I needed to buy some punta music – the pop music of the local Garifuna population. I’d left Trujillo too early in the morning to buy any, and this bus terminal was my last hope. It was close enough to the coastal towns that they might have some; if they didn’t, I’d have to wait till the next time I made it to the coast. I had enough money in lempiras to buy three tapes, if I wasn’t grossly overcharged. So I sat there waiting, until one of the tape sellers arrived and made a beeline for me.
It was some time later when the watch seller arrived. I’d been using an alarm clock as a watch, and seeing him reminded me how impractical that was. Given I had managed to smash the fronts of my last two watches, I chose one with bars across the face. And a compass on the side; tapping it would make it change its mind and swing in a different direction. He wanted 200 lempiras for it. I only had 55. In the true spirit of bargaining, he accepted it and moved on to the next table. I now had three punta tapes and a watch.
Six and a half years later, my mind has been back in that chair at that table in that bus terminal all morning, disregarding the chaos around me and the backlogged workload. I’ve never forgotten that afternoon – one afternoon out of the half dozen or more times I changed buses there – nor have I ever understood its significance for me.
When I’m travelling and not commuting, I lose all concept of time and impatience; time simply flows around and past me. And perhaps that explains why I still cherish that afternoon, still feel drawn to it: the sense of peace and relaxation, even the sense of space without any buses parked on the dirt square.
Or maybe it’s one of those places which scream at you that you’re truly in Central America. The kind of place you need to go to shake off the London stress and ingrained habits; the kind of place you can hold in your memory when you return and use as a protective shield against the grimness of everyday life.
Posted by chantal at 03:55 PM | TrackBack
December 01, 2002
Blissful Peace
Tracey’s been off sick for the third consecutive day, and this is my second day with a minimal workload. I can barely remember why I was so desperate to leave this job.
This has also been our fourth day without a manager, and it’s amusing to watch the power shifts within our department. Or the shifts in dynamics.
Let me start with Tracey, as she’s so hard to forget. Judith came into our office on Tuesday to inform me Tracey had called, she wouldn’t be in and would somebody call her back. Judith told me that a consensus decision had been made not to. Yesterday, most of the department was in my office when Debbie, Tracey’s sole friend, reported that Tracey had thrown her back out, was in a lot of pain and could not move, was worried about her workload and was very upset. Debbie was the only one who appeared at all concerned or indeed bothered by the news. Later in the day, she complained to Judith about Tracey’s attitude and behaviour; it seems Tracey has lost her last remaining friend.
I suppose Tracey had the most to lose when our boss left last Friday. Debbi and Andrea, who left last Wednesday, were half of the smoking crowd; now only Debbie is left. Debbi appeared to go to great pains to reassure Tracey about her significance and irreplacability, which to everyone else represented an aversion to dealing with her.
On Monday, it seemed that Tracey was the most obvious person vying for managerial role. Despite her tendency to become overwhelmed and hysterical over every little event – which is far from healthy in a chronically busy office – she seized the opportunity to remind everyone she was in control, from bullying the lawyers over their timesheets, making a complaint about me (that she had to do all the typing, which she doesn’t actually do), and finally provoking me into two arguments. We no longer had anybody in charge; she was untouchable.
The most noticeable problem which arises when you lose your manager is: who fills in the gap? If you’re not happy about what a colleague has done, there is nobody to turn to, after all. We do indeed have a token manager, Colin, who is very busy being the Head of Housing and who has not yet realised that being Debbi’s replacement requires more than an hour of his time each week. Dawn seems to have become Debbi’s natural replacement, however Colin visited while she was out at a meeting on Tuesday, spent about an hour talking to Debbie and left before she returned. It was Dawn who warned me that Tracey had complained about me, and that I should watch my back; it’s to Dawn we turn now when we have questions, however, we know that she is carrying Debbi’s workload as well as her own, and has neither the time nor the stature to manage us in any official capacity. Hackney has managed to save money yet again by replacing two people with only one, hoping we will be satisfied with someone who has had little hands-on experience of Social Services, despite his professed enthusiasm. Monday evening, we received an urgent duty call enquiring about our policy regarding illegal immigrants; everyone’s first suggestion was to refer it to Colin; he’d already gone home.
Sylvie tells me I’m being oversensitive, but it does seem that the atmosphere has mellowed a lot since Tracey has been off. Certainly there was little interaction in my office before – surrounded by two fax machines, the printer and photocopier, none of which work particularly well – on Monday, Tracey shouted at Sylvie because our discussion was distracting her, then threatened her on her way out. She also shouted at two men in one of the corridors for doing the same; even in the furthest offices you can hear her simply talking on the phone. Normally some of the lawyers will tease, or make faces at Tracey when she’s not looking (but I am); when Tracey was off sick last week Sylvie transferred her teasing to me instead.
If anything, it seems we all spend a lot more time socialising; the lawyers have their workload and we all have the dysfunctional technology to make us stressed (including the boiler it seems: we haven’t had hot water or heating for two days. We’ve decided that Hackney didn’t pay its gas bill and has been cut off), however that we can deal with so long as our environment is peaceful. I’ve switched from chamomile tea to ginseng tea, and joke that I too am responsible for perfuming the air in the office, only now we have herbs instead of stale cigarette smoke and alcohol.
The greatest perk of having reduced my workload is that I have more time now to work on anything IT-related. I’ve upgraded Sylvie’s internet browser, and created a hotmail account for her; I’ve been asked to set up two more. I’ve connected Judith to the network, and helped set up Candice on her computer (with Debbi’s hard disk) on her first day. I started work on a database but got distracted, probably by working on the department’s first worksheet. Once I start reading my VBA book I can start developing some applications for the benefit of my CV.
I no longer watch for Tracey’s reaction when I arrive in the morning: will she swear? will she blank me? will she pull a face? but slowly settle in, taking my time over starting on the day’s work if there’s nothing pressing, perhaps chatting with one of the lawyers until the others start arriving. I don’t have to slam the headphones on my ears immediately in order to drown her out, nor do I have to worry about constant back and shoulder pain or headaches.
Perhaps Sylvie’s right, perhaps I am the only one so affected by Tracey not being there. Debbie smokes alone now, and seems to spend far less time in my office, yet she is the only one whose patterns have significantly changed. Yet we can all relax without the endless shouting, swearing and rows, the feeling of being under siege in the workplace.
I don’t know what exactly she’s done to her back, but if she’s in excruciating pain and bedridden after two days, without painkillers or physiotherapy, it’s going to be a very long time before we see her again. Oh God, I hope so…