Social Tourists Remain Committed to Honduras

By Marco Cáceres
It's hard to tell for sure, but I am sensing that humanitarian and volunteer groups from North America are starting to return to Honduras in growing numbers of late. I've noticed a marked increase in e-mails from friends and acquaintances with church mission groups, university student teams, medical brigades, and civic clubs who are busy preparing for an upcoming trip to some isolated Honduran town, village or hamlet. Last night, I received an e-mail from my friend Jennifer with Cape CARES of East Orleans, Massachusetts. She was only hours away from departing with her medical brigade for the village of Los Encinitos near the town of Yauyupe in the department of El Paraíso, south of Tegucigalpa. She was excited. I have also observed more articles in small-town newspapers throughout the US highlighting a planned mission trip to Honduras by a local organization.

I know, for example, that First Baptist Church of Clarks Grove, Minnesota is preparing to send a team to help children with special needs at an orphanage in Azacualpa. Gehlen Catholic School in Le Mars, Iowa is continuing to organize student teams to work in villages like El Guante and El Junco. The Friends of Barnabas Foundation of Chesterfield, Virginia has been sending medical teams every month to towns like La Esperanza and La Paz, and its next mission is scheduled for March 13-21. MEDICO of Georgetown, Texas will be sending a medical, eye and dental team to El Triunfo on March 13-20. Operation Smile of Norfolk, Virginia will send a facial reconstruction surgical team to work at the San Felipe hospital in Tegucigalpa during February 25 to March 2. Send Hope of Allen, Texas is preparing for its second of six dental missions this year to La Mosquitia on March 13-20.

The list goes on and on. To get a sense of where some of these organizations are working throughout Honduras, check out projecthonduras.com's "Honduras Aid Map".

There is a lot of wonderful work being done in Honduras by thousands of humanitarian and volunteer groups from all over the world, although most of them clearly come from the US. Of the roughly US$600 million in revenue generated by the tourism market in Honduras last year, projecthonduras.com estimates that anywhere between one-quarter to one-third is produced by the "social tourism" sub-market. These social tourists are a diverse crowd, but mainly they are compassionate foreigners who visit Honduras to perform short-term (1-2 weeks) volunteer work. They contribute their time, expertise, experience, talents, and other "human capital" which help to empower the people of Honduras in a wide range of areas, including education, healthcare, leadership training, clean water, micro-credit, care of orphaned or abandoned children, and community building.

But these social tourists also spend a fair amount of money in Honduras on obvious things such as lodging, restaurants, taxis, tour operators, shopping, and site-seeing.

It is unlikely that the Honduran government has a full grasp of the value of social tourists to the Honduran economy. But I've been tracking this sector for more than a dozen years, and I can tell you that it's huge, and it is growing through word of mouth and online networks. Social tourists develop personal relationships with the people they support in Honduras, and these ties tend to endure over the long-term, which means social tourists want to return to Honduras year after year, and they inevitably share their experiences with their friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances, which in turn creates new social tourists for Honduras. It's kind of a domino effect.

Occasionally, some of these social tourists decide that they want to do something more sustainable in Honduras, and so they opt to set up an orphanage or medical clinic or a micro-enterprise in the country. Initially, they simply provide oversight and funding from afar, but eventually many end up moving to Honduras to live and work. Then, they are no longer "social tourists", but they're still engaged in the kind of humanitarian and volunteer projects that introduced them to Honduras in the first place.

This is truly a phenomenon that has been evolving for decades, but particularly since Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras in October 1998. The pace of social tourism in Honduras has clearly picked up during the past 12 years, and it has happened naturally. The Honduran government has done virtually nothing to actively promote social tourism. In fact, it has done some things (... probably unknowingly) to hold back this market. This needs to change.

On behalf of Honduras Weekly, I want to thank every single humanitarian and volunteer for giving so much of their human and financial capital to the cause of empowering the people of Honduras. Without you, the situation in the fourth poorest country in the Western Hemisphere would be vastly more unkind, unjust, and unstable. I encourage all of you to keep traveling to Honduras. If there is anything that we can do to facilitate the implementation of your projects, e-mail us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . I invite you to regularly share your stories with us.

I also invite you to attend the 11th annual Conference on Honduras in the town of Copán Ruinas on October 14-16, 2010. The event will be presented by projecthonduras.com. It will be sponsored by Special Missions Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit out of Georgetown, Texas. It will be co-sponsored by Honduras Weekly. (2/19/10)