Our boat sped out across the Caribbean away from Honduras, bouncing on the the low rolling waves and occasionally spraying the warm sea water across those of us seated in the back. Only after the land was out of view did I really start to think about how easy it was for us to leave.

At $50 each, our boat tickets to Belize were well out of reach of the average Honduran. Most earn only $100 a month, and they have little hope of saving anything. Almost all of their income must go toward food and rent; for even skilled workers it costs more than half a day’s wages to buy enough beans for a few meals. You don’t have to spend much time in the country before you start to see those who have a roof over their heads and meals of any kind on the table as fortunate.

Honduras consistently ranks as one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and evidence of that fact is seen even in the richest areas of the country. The capital city, Tegucigalpa, consists primarily of sprawling tin-and-wood shantytowns that cover the steep mountain slopes around the downtown area. They are the sort of impromptu developments that famously collapse en masse during major earthquakes or hurricanse, causing thousands of deaths.

There are high-rise buildings, a few upscale businesses catering to travelers and a smattering of people walking around in business suits. If you confined yourself to a few city blocks, it would seem possible to sheild yourself from the most glaring signs of poverty.

But even in those guarded, well-developed areas of the city, they are there. Behind a newly built city park with stucco walls we saw a vacant lot filled with trash. This is a common sight throughout Latin America. In this lot, however, five enormous pigs nearly blackened with filth grazed through the refuse, oblivious to the half-dozen constantly barking dogs or the 20 or so vultures moving through the trash with an ugly waddle. The animals were near downtown Tegucigalpa and there were no homes nearby. The pigs appeared to have no owners.

A day later I was walking through downtown when it began to rain. I saw an old woman sprawled on the sidewalk shift herself under an awning as she spread soaked newspapers across her lap. As I got closer I saw that her legs had been ravaged by elephantiasis. Both were grotesquely swollen and deformed and covered with patches of dried, dead skin.

Those wretched sights aren’t endemic in Junquillo, where we hope to work next year, but seeing them is a reminder that in Honduras, even the most ambitious and gifted residents have little hope of escaping the crushing poverty there. As one Costa Rican friend of mine puts it, Honduras is the place “where dead dreams go to die another day.”

The internationally publicized phenomenon of the crumbling U.S. dollar and the fragile state of our economy would make it ignorant, arrogant and absurd for me to start talking about how rich we are in America and how we so often take it for granted and all that jazz. Just the same, when you see people suffering like that it’s tough not to feel guilty about the undue privilege we were born into; our economic worst-case scenarios would still leave us richer than almost all Hondurans. Running water, seeds for family gardens or a kindergarten–things mission teams could help provide–are well out of the reach of Junquillo residents. They would come at little cost to a team from the U.S. and would drastically improve the residents’ quality of life, and when you realize that, you want to get started right away.

Looking at the few Hondurans on the boat with us, I felt as though they had dodged a bullet. They were packed not for a visit, but for a move to a better life in Belize.

By comparison, Belize seems utterly rich. But it’s not. Countless Belizeans live in a sort of poverty not normally seen in the U.S. and there is plenty of work to do there. As we’re seeking it out, though, it’ll be hard to shake the thoughts of the suffering in Honduras.

-Steven B.