The idea of traveling alone for a month with kids in Central America wasn't particularly daunting for former Peace Corps volunteers Katie Sebastian and Ann Hendrix-Jenkins, but settling on Copan for the first two weeks was a challenge.
Honduran town embraces two U.S. families
Apr 24, 2005
Northern New Jersey Record
[Excerpt]
The last shred of the bubble popped on their eighth day in Copan. A couple of suburban American mothers, walking up the street in this hilly mountain town in western Honduras, saw a motor-scooter taxi careen by in the usual helter-skelter way.
These red tuk-tuk cabs are the transit water bugs of Copan, scuttling around town, picking up passengers and depositing them a few blocks away for a handful of lempiras. Sometimes entire families of five or six would jam into the three-wheeled carts for a bouncing ride over the cobblestones.
But in the back seat of this one were just two tiny blond heads, instantly recognizable to the surprised moms as their own youngest children, a couple of pre-kindergarten tourists on their own in Central America.
"That's when I knew we had surrendered to Copan," said Katie Sebastian, a normally look-both-ways, don't-talk-to-strangers parent. "We looked at each other, but just decided to trust the situation. And off the kids went on their merry way."
When last seen, Cole, 4, and Tyrie, 5, had been safely ensconced in a private language school, playing counting games and singing Spanish nursery rhymes. But class had ended while their older sisters, Isabel and Dillon, both 7, were still playing Spanish Scrabble in their own class and the moms were on a walk to the empanada shop.
For the kids' teachers, it was the work of a moment to pop the tykes into a tuk-tuk and ship them off to the homes of the local families where they were living. That's just how you get kids from one place to another in Copan.
Katie's traveling partner was my wife, Ann Hendrix-Jenkins, and they were the only parents present. Katie's husband Jim and I, conserving precious vacation time at home, wouldn't join them for another few days. They didn't seem to need any backstop from us.
"Suddenly we found ourselves in that idyllic small-town comfort zone of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' " said Ann, ordinarily another safety-first acolyte from the Washington suburbs. "I'm sure some people wouldn't think it was funny that we let these kids be sent off without seat belts on some stranger's taxi, but we could tell how much these people cared for children. They didn't need an insurance company to tell them how to take care of them."
If suburbia were a disease, Copan just might be the cure. That's what two moms and their four young children discovered on a two- week language-school holiday in a little town where willing tourists are granted instant citizenship. They started out looking for a place to give the offspring - all of whom were in or about to be in Spanish immersion schools back home - a real-world language workout during summer break.
What they found was a town that also unwrapped some of the cloying binds of risk-free modern life. Copan is a place where community still trumps liability, where you still have to trust your instincts and maybe a stranger or two, and where even a kid can climb up on a rented horse and go for a gallop across the countryside.
