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Honduras Urban Life
Urban life in Honduras, as in many developing
countries,
highlights the contrasts between the life-styles of the
rich and
the poor. For the wealthy and powerful elite, Tegucigalpa
and San
Pedro Sula offer blocks of elegant apparel shops and
jewelry
stores. Tall office buildings provide headquarters for
business and
professional people. Comfortable homes shelter well-to-do
families;
a good education and family contacts secure promising
future
careers for their children.
For the vast majority of Tegucigalpa's urban
population,
however, living conditions are dismal. Migrants to
Tegucigalpa
initially settled in the slums of the center city. When
these
became inadequate to house the numbers arriving, the
migrants began
to invade land on the periphery of the city. A majority of
these
barrio residents live in cuarterķas (rows) of
connected
rooms. Some cuarterķas face the street, while
others are
arranged in double rows facing each other across a
block-long
alley, barely wide enough for a person to walk through.
Usually
windowless, the substandard rooms are generally
constructed of
wood, with dirt floors. The average household contains
about seven
persons, who attend to all functions of daily living in
the single
room, although sometimes a small kitchen stands in the
rear covered
by the overhang of the tile roof. For those living in the
rooms
facing an alley, the narrow passageway between buildings
serves
both as a sewage and waste disposal area and as a
courtyard for as
many as 150 persons.
The major survival tactic for some of this population
seems to
lie in the large and extended families that deliberately
cluster
together into a single room, sharing a roof, a kitchen,
and their
incomes. Both relatives and unrelated individuals may be
involved
in such a network of social, psychological, and economic
support.
Others, however, have not been so fortunate. Given
migratory labor,
high unemployment, and income insecurity, male-female
relationships
often are unstable. Fathers frequently desert their
families,
leaving the care and support of children entirely to
mothers who
struggle to earn enough for survival. Some children are
abandoned
to live on the streets, particularly if the mother has
become sick,
has died, or has been unable to find work.
The diet of lower-sector urban dwellers when they can
afford to
buy what they need is somewhat better than that of their
rural
counterparts. In times of economic hardship, however,
urban
families, who must pay for all the food they consume, most
likely
reduce or alter their food consumption habits. Speaking of
a
potentially better diet in urban areas can, therefore, be
misleading. When urban families have the cash to purchase
basic
foods, their per capita daily average consumption of
calories,
protein, and carbohydrates are all likely to be higher
than the
average in rural settings. However, the consumption of
calories,
and carbohydrates in particular, still falls significantly
below
the minimum daily recommended allowance. Other foods sold
mainly in
city markets, especially meat such as poultry, are
consumed
primarily by the middle- and upper-class population and do
not
benefit the lower class.
Data as of December 1993
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