Stories - Honduras

Honduras Gladys Lanza
from Trauma Healing and Transformation
Chapter 1, pp. 11-12, 267

There are many profound and inspiring examples of healing and transformation that can happen through the use of body-mind-spirit practices. Gladys Lanza from Honduras stands out as one of the persons who has suffered the most and who has been most transformed. Gladys ranked as top woman union leader in Central America during the 1980s and was actively involved in the struggle to promote the rights of workers. She served as national president of the electrical union as well as national president of the federation of popular grassroots organizations, representing tens of thousands of people. Gladys stood up to the military and those in power speaking out boldly for human rights and justice. I met Gladys in 1988 in Tegucigalpa during my first solidarity trip to Honduras. Glady'sface was intense, hardened by years of political struggle. Under death threat at the time, Gladys was on the run, sleeping in a different place each night. Shortly after meeting her, I heard that her house was firebombed and her union broken.

I again met Gladys in 1994 when she participated in my first Capacitar workshop in Honduras. She was unemployed and doing volunteer work with Centro Visitación Padilla, an activist center working with women's issues, peace issues, and human rights. Gladys had recently learned how to meditate and had realized what was missing for her in all the years of political struggle a spirituality to inspire and nourish her activism. At my workshop Gladys discovered that she was a healer. She had never done body-mind-spirit work before, but immediately recognized that she had tremendous healing power in her hands. During the workshop a group of women learned that they had been dismissed from their jobs. Gladys immediately went into action demanding severance pay from their employers, all the while consoling the women with her healing hands. My favorite image is of Gladys, hovering over one gravely distraught woman, calming her with a session of Polarity. At the same time she demanded of the bank president that he cash the woman's severance check! Through daily use of Tai Chi, meditation, acupresssure, and other body-mind-spirit practices, Gladys healed and transformed her own trauma and woundedness. She is now a woman of grace and light for others. Her face radiates peace and love as she shares her own life story and her commitment to heal and transform the trauma suffered by so many people in Honduras. Gladys teaches and uses the body-mind-spirit practices with many of her people, including the tortured, prisoners and their families, abused women, the indigenous, the elderly, and the victims of Hurricane Mitch. Gladys says that although she struggles to survive economically, she has never been happier, nor has she ever felt more alive.

Gladys lived through many kinds of traumatic experience: poverty, death threats, political violence, psychological torture and abuse, and natural disasters. Given the reality of her world, the traumatic situations will continue, however Gladys is spiritually and energetically different. Her heart is awakened and renewed. She is able to handle traumatic stress with great wisdom and compassion, centered in her body-mind-spirit. From this inner source of peace, energy, and strength, Gladys is able to reach out in compassion to heal and transform her community and society.

Gladys who embodies the fierce and loving compassion of Kwan Yin, recently said to me: The powers that be don't realize how subversive I have become. I am now committed to a revolution of love and transformation of the heart. Somehow I am able to see in those who I used to call the enemy, the same possibility for compassion and grace that I have learned to recognize within myself. And no violence can destroy that! This is the challenge and fulfillment for each of us as we heal and awaken.

Honduras Alba de Mejia
from Trauma Healing and Transformation
Chapter 3, p. 26

Breathwork was a very helpful exercise for Hondurans who suffered the trauma of Hurricane Mitch. Some of the people most affected by the hurricane were men in the prisons. The prisoners not only suffered the terror of the hurricane and the distress of not knowing what had happened to their families, but also they survived without water, food, and aid for a number of days after the disaster. The prisoners revolted over these inhuman conditions, took control of the prison, and a number of men were killed in the ensuing violence. Alba de Mejia, founder of Centro Visitación Padilla, a center for peace and human rights, was one of the first persons to enter the prison to bring aid and to help negotiate the disarming of the prisoners. Breathwork was one of the practices she taught some of the men to help them to regain contol and to release the trauma. In the poverty and desperation of the prison the men had nothing except their own bodies. With breath they could do something for themselves to release the rage and pent up emotions, to regain control of their lives, and to focus their energy in the difficult situation.

Honduras Juan Bonilla Almendares, M.D.
from Trauma Healing and Transformation,
Chapter 3, p. 24

Juan Almendares, M.D., founder of the Center for the Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, Prisoners and their Families (CPTRT) in Honduras has first-hand experience of healing trauma. Juan's clinic CPTRT is one of the few clinics in the world using only holistic methods of treatment. Juan was trained as an internist and physiologist at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania. He served as physician, professor at the medical college, and rector of the University in Tegucigalpa. During the years of the violence in the 1980s Juan became involved in the struggle for human rights and justice in Honduras. A number of his friends were assassinated, and Juan himself received death threats. His house was machine-gunned, he was imprisoned on several occasions, and was psychologically tortured. Out of fear, no one would rent him a place for his clinic, and professional colleagues rejected him.

When I first met Juan five years ago he was just starting a holistic clinic and was in the process of learning alternative healing methods. He studied the natural remedies of his culture and even authored a book on the herbal remedies of Honduras. When asked why he used only holistic therapies at CPTRT, he laughed that he was a curandero, a healer in training, following the legacy of his mother who was also a grassroots healer. He chose to use natural remedies that would be easily accessible to the poor who came to his clinic. After Hurricane Mitch over 10,000 people received help through CPTRT or Juan's other project of COHAPAZ, Honduran Health Brigades for Peace. When Juan works with persons who have gone through violence and trauma, he uses simple energy practices and natural remedies, and teaches the people what they can do for themselves. Some of the practices in this chapter are ones that I have taught Juan's staff at CPTRT. They are using these practices, as well as teaching them to groups including: staff and prisoners at the men's and women's prisons, families of prisoners, youth groups, gangs, families, the elderly, rural and indigenous communities, victims of Hurricane Mitch, people living in refugee camps.

Juan has learned to let go and release the pain and suffering from the past in order to live mindfully in the present. Juan is an inspiration to many people and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the tortured and with prisoners, and for promoting human rights in his country.

USA Florida/Honduras
Carol Biolock, RSCJ and Marta Bernhard
from Trauma Healing and Transformation,
Chapter 5, p. 190

Honduran Marta Bernhard, concerned with the situation of older women in her country, invited 70-year old Carol Bialock RSCJ, to come and work with her. Marta and Carol visited the grandmothers and called together a circle of crones, women of wisdom and age, who in spite of ill health and bent bodies had to work to stay alive and support their families. Within the circle these tired broken women, told their stories, supporting and nourishing each other. In the process of ritual and dance they discovered who they truly are as women of wisdom. Carol wrote: I like to think of the grandmothers as bread and perfume, who feed the body and nourish the spirit. Together we built an altar to honor the valiant women who have gone before us as models. We spoke the names of our mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers. We lit candles, sang, and gave blessings, with seeds in our hands, for seeds are the symbol of the crone, the way life continues. And through it all we danced, some with a hobble and a limp, but we danced!

Honduras Sandra Simón, Psychologist
from Trauma Healing and Transformation, Chapter 4, p. 94

Sandra Simón has long been a practitioner of meditation and prayer. In her work as a psychologist at CPTRT, the Center for the Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prisoners, meditation has become even more important to her as a daily practice. Sandra brings so much love and compassion to her work. The stories of the people she accompanies are often horrific, and her role is to be compassionately present to their healing process. To connect with the sacred being of each person, however tortured they may be, it is necessary to stay clear, centered, and grounded in oneself. Sandra daily grounds herself in the wellsprings of grace and light.

Honduras The Women of the Prison System
from Trauma Healing and Transformation,
Chapter 3, p. 80, 86

Psychologists and social workers from the men's and women's prisons in Honduras have used holistic practices to work with the people in their charge. In the women's prison all 210 prisoners received some training in body-mind-spirit practices. The River of Life exercise has helped many women who feel like failures and victims of tragic circumstances, to look at the good they have done and what they have learned along the way. In the men's prison at Tamara, psychologist Clara NuÒez, sociologist Georgina Ponce, and outreach staff Adela Zuniga trained staff and some prisoners to begin to make changes in the violent atmosphere. The majority (over 3,000 men in this prison) are poor men caught in drug sales, robbery, or violence, most victims of desperate circumstances. Most never had considered the meaning of their lives, so the exercise provided an opportunity to look at the past and to recognize what learning they may have gained. Some of the prisoners are being trained to be facilitators so that many more prisoners may be helped by the process.

Movement meditation has also been used by a number of Central Americans to empower people who went through the trauma of Hurricane Mitch. The movement opens one to the forces of nature and to the natural cycles of life, death, and resurrection. Staff from the women's prison in Tegucigalpa found this to be a wonderful exercise for the women prisoners, whom they respectfully refer to as women deprived of their liberty. Brenda Argueta, Cenaida Andrade and Marysabel Matute shared how many of these women felt helpless in the face of the hurricane, overwhelmed by worry for their families outside the prison. The elements of nature to them became terrifying. With the movement Salute to the Sun the women were able to reconnect with the elements of nature, to let go of their emotional pain and fear, and to experience the healing of themselves as part of the cycles of the earth and the sun.