Alone Time

I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry but a night.
Do not detain me, for I am going
To where the rivers are ever flowing.
            -Traditional song, c. 1862

Nutie and I have been on the move since the tenth of December and we haven’t stopped yet. To the best of our knowledge, we have been following the path on which God has led us, and certainly we have ministered—if indeed ministry is just a fancy word for serving God and the people around you—it’s just that we haven’t done it in the place designated as our “mission field.” Also, God has abundantly provided for us in that we have certainly been ministered to, with beds and meals and all manner of kindness (for which we are very grateful to many of you). But in the end, one feels a yearning to be back home, to unpack one’s bag. Ironically, home to me happens to be that selfsame mission field.
Truthfully, I haven’t seen one Miskito face (with the exception of my children and grandchildren) until this morning when I ran into three men in La Ceiba, Honduras. They recognized me but not I them because they are of my children’s generation and probably were kids the last time I saw them. Funny how that works.
Throughout our travels, Nutie has been my constant companion, but she dropped me off at an airport shuttle transfer station in Fort Collins three days ago—she to stay at her mother’s bedside in Colorado as I head back to Utila where I resume helping out at the Rio Coco Cafe.
Time by myself affords me the opportunity to gauge just how much my life has changed since I first met her. So this is what I have to tell you about; the chronicles of Tom traveling alone, practicing being the new me without her assistance in a world that is breathtakingly beautiful but at the same time slightly off-kilter so that nothing really works properly. I am constantly attempting to arrive at a place where everything is as it should be—just like everybody else—but I, having access to grace through the Lord Jesus Christ, hold myself responsible to receive it and give it out “on the road,” which is an amalgam of diverse kinds of people in uncomfortable situations against a backdrop of awesome vistas, like Utila.

Destination, Utila

Denver International Airport, aka DIA. For a brief moment I feel like a little boy, wide-eyed, pulling Nutie’s little red carry-on bag—my check-in—behind me like a wagon while scanning a large, cavernous airport terminal. Senses heightened, I feel vulnerable in the rush of people. Where do I go? I have my harmonica with me for when I feel lonesome, and I  have seats together with Jesus on the airplane. I get my bearings. I remember: I’m an old man.
My route is a Z: west to LA, east to Miami, south to San Pedro Sula; a total of 20 hours before a 4 hour bus ride, an overnight, and finally the morning ferry to Utila. First leg is a packed, American Eagle commuter flight. I’m carrying a little pink princess backpack—a present for my granddaughter—and guess what? There’s no room for even an empty daypack in the tiny overhead compartments. I’m holding it on my lap, thinking, and I observe an older couple find their seats across the aisle. The husband, tall and not yet feeble, tries to cram his overstuffed carry-on (I’m surprised they allowed it at the gate), turning it, crunching it, rearranging everyone else’s stuff before giving up. Flummoxed, they both wander back out into the frigid jetway. I follow—we have a similar problem.
They are heading to Saigon with another stop in Hong Kong. Gate check? No, because they’ll miss their connection. Check it through to their final destination? No, because it’s frikkin’ SAIGON for chrissake and an18 hour trip and they need all of the bag’s contents to tide them over. The wife’s face is twitching. “Can’t you make an exception?” They want to put it in an empty first class bin but no can do.
The gate officer has bustled down the jetway to the logjam at the plane’s portal and stands beside the “One World” decal. Agitated, she says to the flight attendant, “This flight is just going to be delayed that much longer,” then turns to the couple. “What do you want to do then, get off the plane?” They are incensed. People are dodging, still trying to board the plane. Everyone is stressed.
A small girl with a round, Korean face is the flight team’s underling who will carry out orders. She looks like she’s barely eighteen. I meekly surrender the empty backpack and she checks it through to San Pedro Sula. “Are you sure it’s going to be there when I arrive?” “It’ll be there,” she says reassuringly. I thank her and return to my seat. Now she must deal with the anxious couple.
The others return without their bag. After take-off, the wife’s face is still twitching and she’s blinking madly as they conspire together with urgent gesticulations. I resolve to speak words of comfort to them if I get the chance, which happens later, on the inter-terminal shuttle at LAX. After our conversation, I note that it has been a post Nutie exchange. Beforehand, I would have merely said to myself, “Typical Americans.”
It turns out that the couple got their way—the bag went first class. Aleena’s princess bag was also there in San Pedro Sula and my granddaughter was there to meet me with hugs.

Approaching San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The lines at immigration split, Honduran citizens and residents to the right and foreigners to the left. There is only one agent to handle each station, but the line for foreigners is longer and much, much slower. It is 1:35 and my bus to La Ceiba doesn’t leave until 3:05. Plenty of time, no? 
I am surprised that most of the people with me in this queue are Hondurans who are traveling with US passports. Why don’t they exercise their Honduran citizenship? The woman in back of me, a black Garifuna from Tela, explains the situation. She has dual citizenship but if something were to happen to her while traveling with her Honduran documents—after all this is the “Murder Capitol of the World”—the US government would not look into it. A Garifuna man dressed like a checkerboard in white and black, New York spelled out on his cap, expresses his irritation at his backward fatherland with the F word. He is standing next to me but because the line is cordoned off so that it doubles back on itself, he is really 15 places behind. At 2:15, not having advanced significantly, he jumps to the line designated for “special cases,” which usually refers to the handicapped, pregnant women, and senior citizens. I suppose he could very well be a senior, but he has taken a partner-in-disgust with him—a sloppy white American in what seems his late twenties. The latter complains of diabetes and says that he hasn’t eaten all day. I am 65, I haven’t eaten since yesterday, and I’m starting to worry about making my bus. I decide to sit tight; maybe I want to make it interesting.
The Garifuna guy makes his plea and the petite immigration woman at the booth accepts. In a minute he’s gone, admitted into Honduras. The American steps forward, becomes belligerent, and the petite woman pushes back. Several men in uniform rush over to tell him in broken English that he needs to go back to the visitors line. He protests. There is a commotion. The Honduran Americans in my line adjure the agent to stop wasting time and let the guy through already. Meanwhile, the officer at the Honduran Citizens’ section has dispatched his last customer and several of the Hondurans who have U.S. passports migrate over there. It is now 2:30. I get Evelio, the taxi driver, on the phone; he says it takes 20 minutes to get to the bus stop. Aleena is with him; they’re on their way.
The petite woman is flustered. She has opposed the entitled young man and lost. She waves me forward. Another American. She attempts a smile and tries to be nice. It is plain that she feels hurt, so I give her the Jesus eyes and begin to minister the double balm of submission and fluency in her native tongue.

Evelio drives like a crazy man and we make it to the bus station at 2:55, just as the PA announces the bus for La Ceiba. I go to the bathroom, buy a crummy chicken salad sandwich and bottle of water, then fumble with them along with my ticket and passport at the gate, and finally find seat number 21.
Seat number 22 is occupied by a large, pudgy man-boy who with the help of my imagination turns into a buzzard. He’s all in black like Daddy Yankee, three chains around his neck, and his wings are extended well across the armrest into my ribcage. He has staked out his territory and he’s not budging. “It’s hot,” he sighs languidly to me—sort of. When the bus gets underway he immediately falls asleep with his earbuds plugged; I hear the repetitive electronic drum rhythm. Every time the bus leans around a right-hand curve on the mountainous road, his slack body slams me against the window. I consider Carl Jung’s Law of Attraction: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Hedman Alas Bus to La Ceiba

The bus moves through driving rain. I’m reading Ioan Grillo’s “Gangster Warlords” on my tablet while simultaneously watching the 1997 movie Titanic play mutely on the monitors dangling from the ceiling. Viewing a movie without the soundtrack helps you see how they put the story together. We are almost at our destination. I’m not paying any attention to the other passengers until the door to the waterless WC (directly across the aisle) slams shut with excessive force. A blur of motion just behind my field of vision and a woman’s voice from the row in back of me cursing bad smells and people who don’t close the door.
Arriving, the bus parks so that the exit is directly over a mud puddle and we disembark. The passengers form a fairly orderly line as a lone baggage handler shuffles laconically back and forth from the bus to the platform—at least 30 trips—until all the luggage is piled up behind a railing. By that time the line has become ill defined to say the least, but still I’m officially third, behind Daddy Yankee and Bathroom Doorwoman. With a sense of propriety, the baggage handler calls us in order as best he can. I finish sixth, and remember that line from Ecclesiastes: “The race is not to the swift…”
A cab driver approaches on foot and I hand him my bag, but he promptly trades me to another cabbie for two Honduran nationals and a pile of luggage. I’m trying to figure out if the exchange means my stock is up or down when Bathroom Doorwoman—short and powerfully built, like Tina Turner—comes up behind tugging on a behemoth suitcase. Apparently, she was part of the deal. “Al Ligerito,” she tells the cabbie. Remembering my role as an Ambassador of Christ and fitting with local culture, I open the rear door for the lady before claiming the shotgun seat. I chat with the driver as he weaves through rain-splashed streets till we arrive at an unmarked dwelling. So this is Ligerito; I thought it would be a hotel.
A man waiting outside the door runs out, unloads the giant suitcase, and helps Bathroom Doorwoman negotiate the deep puddles. Just before going inside, she returns and leans into the cab with a bus receipt in her hand. I’m confused. I am trying to be diligent to keep all my receipts for tax purposes—could I have dropped mine back at the bus station? I take it from her but intentionally slip it into my left-hand pocket because I believe I had placed my own in the right. When I arrive at the Gran Hotel Paris and settle into my room, I pull out the crumpled slip of paper. Scrawled in pencil on the back side I read, “Esperanza- 8927-4951.” Oh Lordy I’m still a long way from home.”

At Lorena's

Michael Bagby had encouraged me for years in his characteristically persuasive manner to stay at Lorena Panayotti’s house when I was in La Ceiba, but heck, I had never even met her. I wasn’t the kind of person who could just brazenly ask. I was familiar with the name Panayotti—who in La Ceiba, or Honduras for that matter, hadn’t? The Panayottis are one of a small clique of merchant families who immigrated from Palestine to Honduras in the early 20th century. As a minority, they are thoroughly integrated into Honduran society, but many majority ladinos call them turcos and resent their disproportionate wealth and power.
From the beginning of my friendship with Mike, I noticed that he readily schmoozed with the wealthy even as he embodied the biblical admonition, “Do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly” (Romans 12:16). I, in contrast, hung around mostly with poor people, not because I had anything against the wealthy, but because those were the people I lived with. In all the years I spent in Honduras, the extent of my contact with the Panayotti family consisted of visits to their department store where I could get nice dresses for my wife, Martana, and Nike basketball shoes for myself. I would see Lorena’s mother, perched imperiously in her air-conditioned, glassed-in office, unaware of the customers milling around on the floor below.
Once, somewhere in the jungle, Mike confided, “You know, Tom, we’re really just a couple of dirt-baggers anyway.” I had never heard the term before, but I began to employ it in reference to myself until I met Nutie. She made me promise not to call myself a dirt-bagger anymore.
So this year when Mike requested that Nutie and I help out on Utila and repeated the suggestion to stay at Lorena’s, I asked him to call and tell her I would be contacting her. I know I need to grow up and get comfortable being authentic around high class people. As the Bible says, “Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how to respond to each person” (Colossians 4:6). This is also part of what I am trying on.
Lorena turned out to be the most down-to-earth, gracious hostess one could ever imagine. She personally picked us up at the bus station in the pouring rain, took us home, fed us, and drove us to the quay early the next morning, making sure we got our tickets before she departed. She was completely open, sharing personal stories—some hilarious some painful—and in the company of Nutie who always says the right things, we encouraged and prayed for one another.
Now, traveling alone, I’m back at the hotel, not at Lorena’s. I had halfheartedly tried to contact her during a four hour layover at the Miami Airport and wasn’t getting through when suddenly I remembered it was Semana Santa, the beginning of Holy Week. Hondurans flock to the beach; the hotels in La Ceiba might be full. So I called my son Tommy and asked him to book me online. I feel a little bit like I’ve chickened out.
I wake up on the third day from Colorado (in the same way you count 3:00 P.M. on Good Friday till 6:00 Easter Morning as three days). I see from my hotel room window that it has dawned blustery. The port captain has shut down the pier. No boats today. I am stuck in La Ceiba, so I decide to call Lorena and touch base.  She insists on picking me up and moving me over to her place, and on the way takes me to a wholesaler to pick up dozens of blow-up swimming pools. There has been a run on them at her store—it’s Semana Santa.
I spend the rainy day writing this dispatch in the posh room she’s given me while Lorena does business at the Tienda 99.99, kitty corner from her Mom’s Almacén. The house is immense. Every horizontal surface is filled with portraits of her 4 children—2 boys and 2 girls who are grown. She now lives alone; hence, there are guest rooms all over the place.
Ana, the maid, lets me know that supper is on the table and that she’s going home now. Seven in the evening; Lorena still hasn’t shown up. “She works late a lot,” says Ana. “It’s OK. You can go ahead and eat while it’s hot.” Two places are set at the dining room table. The door closes behind Ana and it’s very quiet. I imagine Lorena would like to have company for supper; I decide to wait for her.
We eat together at 8:30 and this time I tell her my story, mentioning the rough company I used to keep in the Mosquitia and La Ceiba. She knows everybody. I am very honest, wanting to be as open with her as she had been with Nutie and I. I tell her how Nutie and I got together and how my life has changed.
Lorena says something like “Opposites attract,” to explain her wonder at how two very different people like us found each other. After a pause, she says, “Nutie brings out the best in you.”
At first, I take it the wrong way, like she’s making a value judgement about my past. But her body language, her face suggest she’s looking at a friend, a trustworthy person.
“Yes, maybe she does,” I reply, conscious that I’m giving my best.

Arrived on Utila