Teach About Honduras
Below find resources for teaching about Honduras. We hope these resources help you prepare to teach during Teach Central America Week and all year long.
Beauty and Eco-Relationships in the Natural World of Central America
In this lesson for K-8th grade, students learn about three different animals — a bird, a frog, and a butterfly (the motmot of El Salvador, the exquisite spike-thumb frog of Honduras, and the owl butterfly from Guatemala). All these creatures are indigenous to Central America and help us understand the region’s ecosystems. Using visual art, the lesson gives students the opportunity to explore in-depth facts about each animal, while integrating an arts component where students are encouraged to draw the animals and design their own books to scaffold learning.
Books
Activists
In workshops on Central America, we often begin with the question, “How many Central Americans of note can you name?" Below, read about two Hondurans. You can find these bios in Central America: An Introductory Lesson.
Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was an environmental organizer. In 1993, Cáceres became a student activist and cofounded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) to help Lenca Indigenous communities like hers improve their livelihoods, gain territorial rights, and fight illegal development. In 2006, residents of Rio Blanco asked COPINH for help to fight against the Agua Zarca Dam on a sacred Lenca river. They lodged appeals to state, national, and international authorities, but the government forged ahead. In April 2013, she organized a road blockade to prevent access to the dam site. For over a year, the Lenca people used a system of alerts to stay informed and maintain a peaceful presence at the site.
They received death threats and were attacked by security contractors and the Honduran army. But she liked to say, “They fear us because we’re fearless.” On March 3, 2016, Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home. COPINH continues to help the Lenca people reclaim ancestral lands and stop environmental damage from mining, dams, and logging operations. The Agua Zarca Dam has not been completed.
Fredi Onan Vicen Peña is a coffee farmer in Honduras. His family farm has produced quality coffee for a very long time, but recently, his farm has faced extreme weather patterns like he's never seen before. Climate change has wiped out entire harvests, disrupted growing cycles, and promoted the spread of pests. His plants are now plagued with coffee rust.
His brothers and children have fled north in a desperate attempt at survival, leaving their coffee farms abandoned.
For small producers like himself, there is no way to get ahead of this. He has been learning about other species that are more resistant to disease and drought, and has started working with other crops like cacao and avocados.
Poetry
Fray
By Clementina Suárez
I am a poet,
an army of poets.
And today I want to write a poem —
a whistles poem,
a rifles poem —
to strike them in doorways,
in prison cells,
within the walls of schools.
Today I want to build and destroy,
to give hope a lift onto the scaffold.
I want to rouse the child,
archangel of swords,
to be lightning-flash and thunderclap
with a statue of a hero
to topple, to obliterate
the rotted roots of my people.
Freehand Sketch
By Roberto Sosa
They use everything they’ve got to putrify a man alive,
Sketch in a flash
The ample pallor of the murdered
And lock him up in infinity.
.
And so,
Sweetly
Fatally
I have decided to construct
With all my songs
An endless bridge to dignity
So that,
One by one,
The humiliated of the Earth may pass.
Films
Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley
Beginning with the first coup in Central America in three decades, Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley picks up the story of the farmers who responded to the coup by taking over the plantations of the most powerful man in Honduras. The camera follows three of the movement’s protagonists and one brilliant journalist from the capital city over the four years between the coup and the elections that the farmers hope will return democracy to Honduras. Produced by Makila Usine Médiatique and Naretiv Productions.
In the News
Institute for Policy Studies Will Honor Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) at 45th Annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards
Since 1978, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) has served as the representative organization and a leading voice in Honduras for the self-determination and dignity of the Garífuna people in Honduras, a matrilineal people who are both Indigenous and Afro-descendent, whose ancestral territory in Honduras is under constant threat from African palm plantations, Canadian and U.S. tourist operations, mining, energy projects, and drug trafficking.
The Garífuna people’s drum beats were a constant refrain during the months of protests following the U.S.-backed coup in Honduras in June 2009, which gave way to the consolidation of a narco-dictatorship under President Juan Orlando Hernández. In a landmark ruling in 2015, OFRANEH won two cases against the State of Honduras from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in favor of the Garifuna communities for violation of the right to community property and the right to free and informed prior consultation.
While the Black Lives Matter movement was flooding streets in cities all over the U.S. following the police murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, in Honduras, OFRANEH was lifting up the message that “Garífuna lives matter, too” following the disappearance of four of their leaders in July 2020. In early 2021, OFRANEH announced the formation of the Garífuna Research and Search Committee for the Disappeared of Triunfo de la Cruz, “SUNLA” or “Enough” in English.