1249

>From oisin@pobox.com

Weekending Saturday 27 March 1999

Not so much Belize yet; the closest we've got so far is 30,000 feet above

the coastline on the flight down to Tegucigalpa from Houston, and the

introduction to Assad Shoman's 13 Chapters of a History of Belize.

As I write we are well settled in the house of the family we will be living with for the two months we are in Honduras, surrounded by the various bits of technology we brought ourselves and a portable TV with about 20 channels on it, including "CNN en Español." The Nato propaganda and bombs sound much

the same in Spanish. So much for the Partnership for Peace. CNN has one very endearing feature, however, which is that while it is displaying the

temperatures for the cities of the world one of the background images that scrolls by (like in the Angelus) is the Campanile and Front Square as seen from the Rubrics. They don't give you the temperature in either Dublin or Tegucigalpa, but who cares? Just to complete the picture the weather

forecast is quickly followed by an ad for UNICEF, starring CEO Carol Bellamy and featuring a cameo from our very own Mary in a nasty blue and white flowery dress.

The trip was smooth, but not uneventful. Having queued for 40 minutes to approach the check-in desk in Gatwick, we were attended to by a Continental "Concierge", no less, as we neared the top of the queue, performing a routine ticket and passport check, he announced. The fact we were neither

British nor US citizens concerned him somewhat and the one-way ticket perplexed him. He disappeared to consult with some computer or supervisor

for 5 minutes. On his return he ushered us to a check-in desk and declared, with courtesy and firmness, than we were to be treated as passengers Transiting WithOut a Visa (TWOVs, as we were known for the next 10 hours).

It was routine, and we shouldn't be alarmed, although it would entail

giving up our passports and our onward tickets to the crew for safekeeping, and being under guard from the moment we were handed over to US immigration

until the moment we boarded our onward flight. The fact we were from a visa waiver programme country was accepted, but irrelevant. As for our plans to relax by the pool in the Houston hotel where our company had booked us in, and to watch the Oscars live, and at a reasonable hour, well perhaps the guard would come to the hotel with us, that had been known. Besides he was sure there would be a TV in the transit lounge that would be our more

likely lodgings. As we were passed along through the hands of eight more Continental staffers over the following hours we did not protest too much,

but queried politely. We were met with a mixture of bemusement, sympathy, unfailing courtesy and an implicit submission to the will of the almighty US immigration authorities. This busy airline dedicated at least 45 minutes of the costly time of its (mostly English) staff exclusively to us until

finally a bright, friendly and uncertain North-American delivered our TWOV security envelopes and ourselves into the hands of an immigration official

at a desk in Houston. The official smiled, took one look at the harp on

the cover of passports, and said "They're Irish, they don't need a visa,

give them back their tickets and let them go." Erring on the side of

caution and honesty, I admitted we only had a one-way ticket to Honduras, and not a ticket back to Ireland. "No matter", he said, stamping our passports, "have a nice trip". Why am I left with the sneaking suspicion

that if the Continental Concierge in Gatwick had been North-American and not English that the true significance of the harp on the passport would

have been realised somewhat sooner.

The fun and games were not entirely over. After a night in a hotel that

had the haphazard service of a family-run establishment, without the compensating atmosphere, we renewed our acquaintance with Continental. This time our one-way tickets were a problem. Did we have a visa for Honduras? No, and we were staying for longer that 30 days (whoops, the truth again). Continental would be fined for transporting us. Out came the line about being volunteers with the Irish equivalent of the Peace Corps, our organization had only bought a one way ticket. Didn't dare evoke Mitch, learning Spanish instead, then moving on. Even a phonecall to Tegucigalpa and reassurances that we would be let in were not enough without the name of an immigration inspector to put on her report. Finally a supervisor was called and, with the look of someone who had flipped a mental coin, he decided the nameless authorization would suffice. The presumed right of the Irish to travel at will and without question had taken a bit of a battering. I suppose we should know by now that travelling without demonstrating the intention and the means to return from

whence you came is not approved of (at least not without NATO bombing as cover). But all was not lost. As we sat by the gate waiting to board, our friend came back over to us and announced she was upgrading us to first

class. So we flew into Tegucigalpa sipping fresh coffee, off linen table clothes, in the company of US cigar dealers.

We would have traded first class to receive more than 1 out of 4 of our pieces of luggage. They did all arrive intact, three days late and, in the meantime, Morína looked surprisingly well in my clothes.

Settling in has been a mixture of adapting and connecting. Adapting to rising between 5.30 and 6.00 A.M., to having Nescafe made with hot milk instead of water for breakfast, to learning to dance the Cumbia with the Colombian lady of the house, to a lack of vegetarian options, to the heat of Tegus in the summer. Connecting to the outside world via the World Service and the Internet. Neil McCann of Fyffes was quoted on the BBC's Caribbean Report on our first morning here. The EU banana regime will

change again, and Fyffes have diversified enough to be unaffected. Direct

aid will replace import subsidy. The family has an internet connection, so by Friday POBOX.COM knew where to forward our email and by Saturday we had our first email from John Daly on "a beautiful Spring day in Dublin". Later, in an internet café owned by a retired Danish-born pilot who had flown planes borrowed from Aer Lingus for a now defunct Honduran airline, I printed a document from my father's solicitor in Dublin, while looking at

an image of Orla's six-month old baby in California. A few bar's of Jim Gogarty's impersonator from Thursday's Vincent Browne show and a blast of pictures and sound from RTE's Nine o'Clock News, broadcast only 2 hours earlier, was enough to know that not much had changed since we left all of a week ago.

Holy Week and holiday season are upon us already, and Spanish classes end on Wednesday. We are off to Nicaragua to spend Easter with Maeve Taylor, as soon as we have met and greeted Mary McAlese who arrives on Wednesday.

Happy Easter. More soon...

P.S. How come the only sentence in the above that Bill Gates' checking

systems object to is "So much for the Partnership for Peace"?