HONDURAS

READ

Mysteries and thrillers are my favorite types of fiction, so I was happy to find a thriller written by a Honduran author for this blog post. Firefall, by J. H. Bográn, follows New York firefighter Sebastian Martin, who has been devastated by the loss of his wife and son in a horrific airplane accident, as he seeks to rebuild his life in Texas. His uncle helps him get a job there as an investigator for an insurance company.

Sebastian has some personal battles to fight throughout the book. The first one is alcoholism, as he drinks heavily to help him cope with the loneliness he feels following the deaths of his wife and son. The second one is the fear of flying he has acquired due to the manner of their deaths. Both of these battles will make his new job more difficult. For example, it isn’t long before he is asked to fly to Honduras to look into the circumstances surrounding a couple of insurance claims.

In Honduras, he teams up with another investigator the insurance company keeps on retainer there, Gustavo Fonseca, and one of their investigations puts them in the crosshairs of a brutal car theft ring. Sebastian and Gustavo will need every ounce of cunning and courage they possess to survive their encounter with these murderous thugs.

Firefall was fun and easy to read, but I wish there had been a few more good, salt-of-the-earth Honduran men and women to balance out all the car thieves and prostitutes that populated the pages. There were too many gratuitous scenes involving prostitutes that did nothing to further the book’s plot. Still, I wouldn’t mind reading more from this author.

COOK

Early in Firefall, Marcos, one of the car thieves, stops at a food shack to kill time while he waits to ambush a guard. So as not to appear conspicuous, he decides he’d better get some food and he orders “a baleada, Honduras’s best-known typical food, a flour tortilla folded in half and filled with refried beans, butter, and cheese. Variants included avocados, scrambled eggs and even sausages.”

I found a vegan baleada recipe on a blog called “Tofu Mom.” I made the tortillas from scratch, then filled them with canned refried beans, Daiya cheddar shreds, and avocado. Tasty!

GIVE

GlobalGiving lists several projects in Honduras, so I chose the type of project I can never pass up – one that brings books to rural communities. According to the Un Mundo Literacy Connections program description, “Poverty/illiteracy go hand in hand. With a 65% poverty rate, over 25% of Hondurans cannot read. In an Un Mundo survey, teachers reported that access to books was the biggest school need. In rural areas, books are rare. In the Cangrejal Valley, only three in five residents have a primary school education.”

Un Mundo’s solution is to build “a regional library with after-school tutoring, adult literacy classes, computer lab, story time, and teacher training. A mobile library that travels by ‘burro’ to isolated, rural areas will provide books and literacy classes to indigenous people who are eager to learn.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/build-literacy-for-families-in-honduras/.

NEXT STOP: HUNGARY