Fintrac Harvest Fall/Winter 2008

Returning Hondurans are coming home to new opportunities

LA LIMA, Honduras – Six years ago, Rogelio Ayala, a farmer in Santa Cruz del Potrero, Olancho, left Honduras and traveled for 22 days in the hope of finding work in the United States.

“I didn’t have anything here,” Ayala said. “I couldn’t find work.” He took buses and cars through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico and tried to cross illegally into the United States at the Arizona border.

He failed and was jailed for two weeks. When he got out, he tried again and walked for three days through the desert and made it to Phoenix. He bounced around to Las Vegas, New Orleans and Miami before settling down in Orlando, Florida where he found steady work in construction.

For six years, he worked six days a week, saving as much as he could. He was doing well but wanted to return to his home. “I missed my mother a lot,” he said. One day he woke up with severe stomach pains. He said he couldn’t afford the hospital bills without losing his savings, so, he decided to come home.

After taking care of his stomach problem, which turned out to be gastritis, Ayala started farming.

For two years he grew corn and watermelons with traditional methods but only earned $1,105 annually from watermelons and very little from corn.

“I was a blind person when it came to agriculture and now I’m learning a lot,” Ayala said.

He started to change his approach after becoming a lead client on Fintrac’s USAID-funded Rural Economic Diversification (RED) project and continues as a lead client with Fintrac’s MCA/Honduras-funded EDA program. Ayala diversified his farm by adding eggplant, bell peppers, onions, and updated his production system with raised beds, drip irrigation and calendarization. In Ayala’s first year with Fintrac, his income increased 357 percent and his second year promises greater returns.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency estimates that 70 percent of the roughly 1 million Hondurans in the US are living there illegally and about 90,000 attempt to cross the US border illegally each year.

According to a Congressional report, 18,941 Hondurans were deported from the US in 2005 and 24,643 were deported in 2006. In 2007, deportations topped 29,000.

Many of these immigrants, including Ayala, are from poor, remote areas where jobs are hard to come by. Fintrac, through the RED and EDA programs, specifically targets these areas to create jobs, economic opportunities and positive emigration alternatives for rural families.