Dispatch Number 83 -Dead Things

Eight months into my journey, back in 2009, I still wore the gleam of the rose-tinted traveler excited by most everything I saw, summoning it up with 'Great!' My romantic perspective was jolted when the well respected, Reverend Lawrence Rosebaugh, an American was shot dead. He had spent over thirty years running missions in war-torn countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Now, he was slumped over the wheel caught in a road-side ambush two kilometers outside the 200-person village I was staying in.

Peace Corp friend, Ted and I watched them drive past his house at 5:30 in the afternoon. Minutes later the Reverend was shot in the head and the others in his group, all priests had their valuables taken at gunpoint. The bandits escaped on foot over a jungle trail with a couple cameras, bibles and a fistful of dollars, leaving a dead man behind. The news sent a chill down our spines because we had driven the same road just a couple hours earlier.

Traveling remote areas, which is usually where I am, carried a new edge after that. In this remote part of northern Guatemala the apathy and disinterest of the police contrasted with the anger of the indigenous communities they were expected to serve. The cops would not enter into a pursuit and the next morning a posse of local farmers took matters into their own hands and gave chase finding evidence, but no robbers.

While in Honduras with Jeff the gregarious Australian we saw these two:

After lunch under piercing Honduran sun we drove on a new highway that cut through the banana plantations along the Caribbean coast. An old man lie dead in the opposite lane. Fresh runny blood poured down the sloping roadway towards our lane as we crawled by in first gear staring out the driver's window, the blood would be in our lane soon. A very old woman of similar age stood pensively over him as if afraid to know who he was, a bicycle lay on the ground near him. The scene looked like it happened minutes earlier. The dead one appeared still warm, blood shiny and fresh pooling by his head and running over the little stones that make up asphalt. We drove seven miles before talking again.

Days later in the same region we saw a group of a 100 people or more surround and stare at a man who lay dead next to his spilled motorcycle. No one touched him and we didn't stop.
Was he dead?, I asked.
Yes, definitely dead. Jeff proclaimed in a doctor's tone.
It was a tone surprisingly similar to one I heard from the doctor caring for my mother, Hope when I asked the same question years back. She was too still to be anything else.

David
Huaraz, Peru