What is Needed for Future Sustainability

The list of needs is a long one, but each year it is getting shorter as volunteer teams are shoring up the leaks and reducing poverty and improving the lives and health of Hondurans. Of course with all this progress the larger projects are now needed. Building schools, sewer treatment plants, bridges and buildings are a major need in both the small towns and in rural Honduras. With these items the rural poor can live safely and have the tools they need to improve their lives, educate their families and live a more comfortable life.

What is desperately needed are things to help with issues of;

Water filtration
Water Retention
Better hygiene
Current electricity
Outdoor Stoves (toxic fumes harmful to the lungs)
Sewer Treatment
Schools
Roadways
Security
Small Micro-Enterprises
Stronger Buildings
Health Clinics

Agriculture

Agriculture, farming and livestock are another big need in the rural regions of Honduras. Helping a family with a farm animal can be one of the greatest gifts. Veterinarian volunteer services are doing a terrific job and more are needed.

Not all of Honduras is made for farming due to the interior terrain, but much is. The low-lying areas with many huge fertile valleys host giant banana plantations. But this is not the case in all of the lowlands. Some areas which are extremely fertile due to 1000s of years of erosion from the mountains means good top soil and farmland on the flat areas, unfortunately due to improper land use often these are the areas people choose to live on and build on rather than farm. In turn run off from these areas erodes and pollutes even more potential farmland.

As the urban areas expand there are more people and less ideal areas to farm. The timber and logging industry in some places causes quickened erosion exacerbating the problems there, thus a better understanding needs to be considered in the decision-making process of where to farm and where to build.

Diversity of agriculture is also important, the more types of crops that can be planted the better the diets and the less issue with healthcare. Just about anything grows well in Honduras, with the wide range of climate. Farming techniques need to be taught and more vocational education in agriculture is needed for those living in the rural areas. Agriculture training is needed and education to realize that their diet is lacking a lot of nutriments contributing to poor health.

Safety and Security

Living without fear is very important for the rural poor in Honduras and by building their villages strong and helping them build up their communities and help all of Honduras lay down the rule of law, will increase the safety and security of all Hondurans.

There is a bit of crime in the cities and there is the ever present danger of an uprising or political unrest from political opposition. Those who live in rural Honduras need to be free from worry of these issues. This will assist them from getting their goods to market and trading without worry of being hijacked in route or robbed. With improved transparency and accountability from government this too will help improve life in Honduras.

Health Upgrades

There are big concerns still on the healthcare issues in Honduras, especially in rural Honduras. Better oral hygiene is needed because most do not brush their teeth. Many children already have their teeth rotting out. Education is needed and the continued efforts of dispensing toothbrushes and toothpaste which is being done very successfully currently on a small scale. This is a great achievement and more must be done. It will require additional funding and resources. It is imperative.

Continued support and funding for contraception is another smart move. The government needs a set of educational programs to be made available to be taught in the schools and through the church. By providing birth control methods-pills, intra-uterine devices, condoms, etc this will help in two ways. One it will slow the birth rate and population increase right now at 2.4% and it will slow the spread of HIV/AIDS as well. This of course meets with a little bit of conflict from a religious perspective although these issues must be addressed and the dialogue must continue.

Now that the volunteer groups are making progress on the rural poor healthcare issues, the efforts need to be maintained at the village level, slowing the birth rate will help in many ways and it will reduce poverty too. Some mothers just cannot feed their many children and this prevents the children from growing up healthy and nourished. Thus, the continued cycle of poverty is on-going. Such realities need to be addressed say many of the volunteers who come back after assisting in rural Honduras.

Education

The building of schools is a major step in the right direction and it will indeed help in breaking the cycle of poverty in rural Honduras. As more and more classrooms are being built students for the first time in all their past generations will now be able to read and write. Greater needs for transportation for children who live far away from a school are also needed. The parents also need to value school and education more as a tool to better their life and their children"s future.

Since the church is entrenched in the daily lives of the rural poor many Churches have set up schools. Vocational training also needs to be taught. Information on how to make things, how to build stuff must also be taught. So they can build their roads safer with strong bridges, durable homes, schools and sewer treatment facilities, septic systems and buried leach lines; also how to build water retention systems, wells and deal with water filtration. All these things should be taught to the males growing up.

By creating vocational training programs on how to maintain a sustainable environment, run a small farm and care for a family the poverty problems will be a thing of the past. Just teaching the rural poor to read and write is not enough, they must be taught how to maintain and grow and taught to fish, as one expert of human habitats and civilizations told us.

What many do not realize is that as we speak right now there are volunteer teams building more schools and training teachers. There is a huge amount of progress being made and things are moving forward and appear to be on the right track. Of course more money is needed, more supplies need to be donated and more teachers will need to volunteer to train the next generation of Honduran teachers to accomplish this goal. Solar Power, Geothermal, Biowaste & Hydro

Out in the mountainous terrain of rural Honduras bringing in electricity is not an easy task. Setting the country up on a power grid is simply not feasible at all. There are other opportunities however. In the dry season solar power is possible as there is less fog or clouds. In the wet season those who live by rivers, tributaries or streams could use small, inexpensive, simple hydro-electric systems or make energy from bio-waste from both humans and animals.

In some parts of Honduras there is ample potential for making geothermal energy there is a lot of energy under the country there and it often causes seismic and volcanic activity in that region of Central America. The energy needs of the growing nation must be considered. Areas near the coast might wish to use ocean wave technology to create energy or a combination of energy sources and then feed that out into the smaller cities and towns.

Rural areas will be on their own of course and they will need to conserve their energy needs while using simple technology, which is easy to maintain and highly efficient. There are enough simple technologies out there to make this feasible and new research on the horizon to find even more and bring those technologies to market for out of the way places such as rural Honduras.

The new schools that are built will also need power, solar power makes the most sense. An inexpensive unit on wheels could provide power for the school on weekdays and the church in the village on Sundays or be moved as needed to the buildings in the center of a village.

Luckily with all the rivers and water flows, Honduras also has an abundant opportunity for hydro-electric power, but that is not possible everywhere in rural Honduras. Many of the open sewage pits could be designed to create energy from bio-waste, as when you are in remote regions it makes sense that nothing go to waste.

Internet Access

Crossing the digital divide is something that is considered very important and each year as technology advances in the world it will become more and more crucial. Most of the volunteers who go and give of their time to volunteer in Honduras do not believe that the people there need the Internet, but they wish it was available for communication while they were there. Of course everyone agrees that in the future it will be essential to have Internet access and that at least the schools should have Internet available.

Luckily Hughes has a Satellite that is Internet Enabled about 200 miles off the coast Southwest of San Diego, straight up in Geo-sync. The coverage footprint could easily service all of Honduras and this could provide Internet access to anywhere in rural Honduras with only a satellite dish on top of a school. Of course this will cost money, but if the whole village can use one Internet account and the Country can pay for this with a group rate then communication will be possible anywhere. Now that is crossing the digital divide direct to the PC in the rural country.

By providing this in the rural schools the students can hook into the Quorum and Pangea Projects for social networking and eLearning online with other students around the world. This means they will have all the Internet access needed to learn how to build their villages, start businesses, get design plans and solve their own challenges in rural Honduras, a place that some people say is the middle of nowhere and rarely get anyone who has ever been there to disagree with that statement.

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