THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
By Denny Harnish
My wife and I took
an Elderhostel trip to Honduras in January to mark the beginning of our
retirement. We soon found out what the elder in Elderhostel stood
for. The youngest of our companions was in her fifties, the oldest was
almost ninety-two, and most of the rest were well into their seventies.
Consequently, the trip was not so active physically as most of our prior
vacations. However, the trip was rich in intellectual content. We visited
museums, schools, coffee plantations, archeological sites, and heard from
professors and other highly informed persons until our heads could contain
not one more fact.
During our trip,
we saw botanical gardens, rainforests, bayous, coral reefs, and many other
interesting places. However, my most vivid memories occurred in and around
the Copan valley in the western highlands of Honduras, not far from the
border with Guatemala. In this valley are located the ruins of the Mayan
City of Copan. This city was never large by modern standards. At its height
it had a population similar to that of Augusta, Maine, but it was a much
grander capital city, often called the Athens of the Mayan world.
The pyramids and
other structures remaining at this site are large and well enough preserved
to give an idea of how they would have looked in Copan’s classic period,
around 700 C.E. All the structures and the freestanding statues of the
city’s rulers were built and carved with great skill and style. However,
Mayan culture is not for the faint of heart. The larger-than-life statues of
the kings, fully dressed for battle, looked down at us mere mortals with
pitiless stares. Some of these mighty warriors wore strings on which hang
the heads of their enemies.
The carvings on
the temples and palaces seemed to depict the creatures of nightmares. A huge
snake slithered down the face of the largest pyramid. Its open mouth formed
a doorway framed by its fangs, which led to the burial chamber of Copan’s
first king, deep within the pyramid. The pictographs that cover both
buildings and statutes were also frightening; they included vampire bats, a
sort of logo for the City of Copan, as well as many other fierce creatures.
Even the peaceful looking grassy court, on which a game like a cross between
soccer and basketball was played with a large rubber ball, became ominous
when we learned that the captain of the winning team was sacrificed after
the game. Indeed, the site included a number of desk-sized boulders over
which human victims were bent backwards while their beating hearts were cut
out.
Still, it was not
the brutality of Mayan culture that spelled its doom. As long as the corn
and rain gods seemed to be appeased by human sacrifice, and as long as the
king and his warriors were able to keep the kingdom safe from its neighbors,
then the peasantry was willing to bear the substantial burden of supporting
sculptors, scribes, and soldiers as well as providing the muscle necessary
to build and maintain the palaces and temples. Indeed, Copan lasted longer
than the U.S. has so far. It is surmised that explosive population growth
coupled with clear-cutting of the hillsides and climate change in the form
of a prolonged drought eventually undermined the corn, bean, and turkey
agriculture upon which the city depended. These factors and unremitting
warfare ultimately caused the people to lose faith with their leaders. In
fact, they seem to have allowed the last king of Copan to be taken by
soldiers to a nearby city, where his heart was removed.
Overpopulation and
climate change? Unpopular wars and leaders? The more things change, the more
they stay the same. Ironically, after regenerating with a thick tropical
forest following the fall of Copan and the implosion of the local
population, hillsides near Copan are once again being clear-cut, this time
to sell the lumber to more prosperous countries and for the grazing of
cattle. When will they (we) ever learn?
Though the
building of cities ceased hundreds of years before the first Europeans came
to this area, the Mayans have never really left. Most of the people in
southern Mexico and in Guatemala are plainly Mayan as are many of the
Hondurans who live in these highlands. And in many ways they live just as
their ancestors did—farming small plots of land in the remote hillsides. The
staple of life is corn, just as it was 1000 years ago. The conservative
nature of Mayan culture was brought home to us in a number of ways. We
visited a fertility shrine, really just a carved stone on a hillside
overlooking the Copan Valley, and there discovered that someone had burnt a
small doll made of a corn husk apparently as an offering.
On the way back from this shrine to the hacienda, where
we later ate a lovely candle-lit dinner in the open air, we passed a typical
Honduran hut made of sticks and roofed with banana leaves. In this shack,
which had no doors, windows, running water, or toilet, lived two small
children as well as their mother and grandfather, both of whom were out.
Picture dirty, bare, tan legs and feet, enormous brown eyes, dark, thick,
straight hair, and round serious faces. The older sister, who was five, wore
a plain little cotton dress. Her two-year-old brother wore only a pair of
tattered shorts. Quite likely these were their only clothes.
The children, who were selling cornhusk dolls, knew our
guide, and so we were allowed to look inside their home. With its bare
floor, lashed stick furniture, stone rolling pin, and concave stone corn
grinder—identical to ones that were thousands of years old that we saw in
museums—this hut could almost have housed the builders of Copan. Yet, even
here there were signs of the outside world. There was a new metal corn
grinder, which the girl proudly pointed out, a portable radio hanging from
the rafters, and a few items made of plastic. Moreover, their mom had a job.
She was making tortillas at the hacienda we were headed to. And their
grandfather was down in town selling coffee. Also, the kids received a
little money from us. So I guess you could say that the trickle down effect
was operating even here, but it is plain that damn little had trickled down
this far.
How to feel about
these kids? Guilty, of course, that we should have so much and they should
have so little. They need (and our country should help them to get) health
care and education. Just think what we could do with the money we spend in
Iraq in just one month. Still, I would certainly rather live in the simple
hut where those kids live than on the streets of Calcutta or in the sea of
pollution that is modern China or anywhere in Haiti. And, these kids are the
inheritors of a culture thousands of years old. They are better rooted on
their hillside than most of us modern people are anywhere in the world. Long
after New York and Paris have gone the way of Copan, the Mayans may still be
growing corn and making tortillas in their hills.
