How to help Honduras

From the Miami Herald

It was the divide that caught my eye.

Two weeks before the coup that ousted Honduras' elected president, we were driving down a boulevard here in San Pedro Sula, the nation's second-largest city.

On the left: newly built single-family homes and town houses, modest gated communities you'd see along Kendall Drive or in Weston, without the fountained entrances.

On the right: a river the color of copper, where bare-chested boys with soiled shorts played in the silt-filled water while girls slightly taller than toddlers laundered the family wash. Behind them: a hillside of wood shanties, where corrugated metal sheets were propped precariously atop wood-slat huts, forming the equivalent of a ''front porch.'' The huts were built atop rocks, dirt, trash and tires, where children played and dogs with rib-cage coats picked for food.

It stretched for miles, known to locals as el bordo.

A week after the military forced Honduran President Manuel Zelaya into exile at gunpoint, I'm left wondering: ``Who is looking out for those children?''

And while I don't condone the overthrow of an elected president, I've been struck by Zelaya's swagger and sense of entitlement.

He wants to return to serve the people: Where have he and his government been?

Yes, there has been progress. Infant and child mortality rates have declined since 1990, UNICEF reports. An early childhood program has helped reduce malnutrition and raised preschool enrollment rates. A new national office has been created to prosecute sex abuse crimes against children.

But has the Honduran government authored many of these changes?

I have my doubts.

Honduras remains the poorest Spanish-speaking country in the Western Hemisphere.

Consider:

• More than 60 percent of its population lives below the poverty line, according to the latest country reports from UNICEF.

• Over one-third of its infants are malnourished; each day nine children lose a parent to AIDS.

• Eighteen percent of the population has no basic medical care, 10 percent do not have clean drinking water and one-third -- one of every three people -- don't have access to sanitation.

I was in Honduras with a group of teens and adults from St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Coral Gables and St. John's Episcopal in Charlotte, N.C. It was our annual pilgrimage to Our Little Roses, a home, chapel and bilingual school for abused and abandoned girls in San Pedro, a city that's home to nearly 750,000 people.

More here-

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/issues_ideas/story/1126806.html