Toncontin Farewell
March 30, 2008
On the day we left Tegucigalpa (see the entry titled “Deciding Moments”) I decided to film the trip from the hotel to the airport. The resulting footage isn’t any better than handheld 8mm movies taken from a moving vehicle could be expected to be, but the street scenes are representative of what we saw each day going to and from our classroom site.
Every day we drove past the city’s only traffic light, installed only a year earlier. The city’s traffic had a much less regimented, more fluid flow than US streets. At one point in this movie, our truck is overtaken by two cars, one of which passes us as the other passes both us and the first car. It has much of the same feeling (with less congestion) as driving in Souzhou, China, at least as I experienced it in 2002.
The movie includes some footage from Toncontin airport itself. A single-engined aircraft takes off; note how quickly it is off the ground, because the next aircraft is a PanAm DC-6 that lumbers down the runway, keeps lumbering, and finally, away off in the distance, rises slowly as it passes over the end of the runway…and the dropoff that waits there.’
Deciding moments
March 29, 2008
Working on another video taken in Honduras in 1965, I am reminded that my trip there probably accounts for a pretty decisive turn in my thoughts about what I would take up as a career. It was the beginning of a decision to leave the military rather than stay in for twenty years and then take up teaching or some other career; of course, the events that were unfolding in Viet Nam at that same time would also play a part in that decision.
I went to Honduras with two other Army officers with the first Military Training Team dispatched to that country following the coup staged by General Osvaldo Lopez Arellano and the army in October, 1963. Although I was unaware of it as I arrived, our group’s appearance on the scene was regarded – at least by the US Military Attache – as an important event.
In the coup that toppled Ramon Villeda Morales, Lopez Arrellano had employed a considerable amount of equipment provided through US military assistance programs, while the forces loyal to the President had relied largely on equipment provided by the US Agency for International Development. In that sense, it had been a conflict in which the Defense Department was the backer of one side and the State Department backed the other side. This seems abstract until one realizes that during the conflict each of the fighting factions was communicating with “their” friends in the US Embassy. While, of course, the Embassy maintained official relations with the legally-constituted government.
The importance of our visit (to the US Military Attache) was to get the military assistance program back up and running and we were a part of that. But for me one of the “lessons learned” from this visit was that the change in government had resulted in a hiatus in US-supplied assistance to all programs. For example, travelling through the countryside there were a lot of unfinished school houses that work had been stopped on after the coup and it appeared that work might not begin again for a while (the schools had been USAID-supported projects initiated by Villeda Morales). I became disillusioned about the ability of government-to-government programs to actually deliver benefits to the people when the programs were so impacted by politics. Later I began to worry that the specifics of the programs were determined bureaucratically rather than by some market mechanism…but that’s a whole other story.
Hey, Mr. Balloon man…
March 9, 2008
Having posted the photo of my mother taken in 1917 or so, it’s not totally out of place to insert this one here. I’ve Photoshopped it for the sepia look, because the color of the original makes it obvious that it’s not a true period photo. It’s actually me at 17 (June, 1958) with the balloons. The occasion is my grandmother Josephine Strong’s 75th birthday celebration, in honor of which her siblings, children and grandchildren (and friends) dressed up in period clothing. My brother Walt and I found “bathing costumes,” lacking somewhat in originality but we ended up being the most comfortable people there.
The most notable thing, I think, was the excess involved in the balloon thing. For the afternoon event, we inflated balloons starting in the morning and continuing on through noon; my fingers were raw from tying the ends of the balloons. We were staging the balloons in the bunk house, and the strings hung down from the balloons forming a room-sized fringe. I think the point was that we had been given a whole great tank of helium and ‘way too many balloons and we just didn’t know when to quit.
We all have in our mind’s eye that picture of a balloon man with a fistful of strings attached to his wares, and in our mind’s eye that cloud of balloons above him is full, robust, and shaped not unlike a fat bush. Trust me, that fullness is not easily achieved. It was almost impossible to hold this group of balloons down for any lengthy period of time, and the tangling of the strings suggested that there was some secret real balloon men have not shared involved in being able to give to each child just the balloon they desire.
