- AP Photo
- A mother and her three-year-old daughter wait for a bus in McAllen, Texas, after leaving Honduras, which has been battered by violence.
My daughter Laura lived just off the street a few doors from the private school where she taught for a year in Honduras. Whenever we Skyped, I braced for the sight of a violent stranger with a gun breaking into her room behind her. As she knew as well as we did—though we were the ones who kept bringing it up—Honduras was one of the most dangerous countries on earth.
Juan Hernandez, president of Honduras, observed the other day that “seven out of nine children who venture on the dangerous journey towards the United States come from the most violent areas of Honduras.” He added, “Those are also the regions where the drug cartels are most active.”
She taught fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in a town a long car ride from San Pedro Sula. When she had to go there, she relied on drivers to get her back and forth. “This road was incredibly dangerous,” she says. One night a colleague picked her up at the airport and then got a call on his cell phone warning him of a vigilante on the road. He immediately called his wife and told her to get inside and stay there, and then “we sped at nearly 100 miles an hour back to town.”
Someone told Laura there was only one DNA kit in all of Honduras, and it was broken. True or not, the story summed up the people’s low opinion of law and order. She was also told Honduras was a place where “no killer was ever convicted of any crime.” A colleague’s father was shot entering his home in San Pedro Sula; another colleague’s husband had been killed a couple of years before Laura arrived.
