Ela and I bade farewell to Lowell and Mayra, our friends in Santa Elena who so kindly hosted us for a needed week of rest, and headed to a small town near the capital, Tegucigalpa.
Valle de Angeles is a quiet, green, artsy pueblo tucked away in the mountains 45 minutes of winding, two-lane highway above the congestion and acrid air of Tegus. We were welcomed here by Balbina, David, and their family. It is a lovely, actively intellectual and progressive home, and we’ve spent hours testing our Spanish skills with conversations ranging from geopolitics, climate change, activism, economics and corruption, to film, music, cooking, and travel. We immediately felt like part of the family, and sharing meals with them in this uncertain period of time in our travel has been an overwhelmingly positive and much-needed salve on the wound of our recent loss.
Balbina introduced us to a local children’s theater troupe, Grupo Teatral Candelejas – Valle de Angeles, and we were invited to go and watch them perform. The kids, aged 8-14, danced on stilts and performed a brief history of the Honduran indigenous revolutionary hero, Lempira, and his resistance to the Spanish colonialists. The children are as you might expect, joyful and brimming with excitement like any young performer first experiencing the thrill of being on stage. We watched and talked with them as they built the set, positioned the lights and smoke machine, got into costume and makeup, and paced around on their stilts.
Their teacher and leader, Carlos Varela, had every bit as much passion and energy for their little traveling troupe as the youngest and most bright-eyed of its members. He sat down for an interview with us after Ela did a bunnymission workshop with some students, and then quickly packed the kids (and stilts) into a bus – off to the next performance. He confided in me that they are so busy he doesn’t get much sleep, and that funding is tight (read, individual donation-based) for the arts, but his warm enthusiasm betrayed not a hint of fatigue.
Last night we accompanied Balbina and David to the home of internationally renowned painter Felipe Burchard in nearby Santa Lucia. Santa Lucia, although completely swamped with local tourists on weekends, is a tiny, picturesque mountainside town with breathtaking views of the sprawl of Tegucigalpa below. Walking along the cobblestone streets, I felt I could easily be somewhere in Tuscany, save for the lightning storm in the brooding sunset, where bright patches of pink and orange peeked through the storm.
The home of Felipe Burchard is modest and hidden away, with a large, tree-filled garden. Felipe, trim and hearty at age 73, lives with his dogs, and his eyes are full of mischief and stories. At least once a week, local intellectuals and artists crowd into his little kitchen, laughing and talking until the room is too full of smoke to see who’s telling the joke. We simply could not have asked for a warmer welcome, or a more beautiful, stimulating place to rest our heads for this time as we continue the work of making our films.