Melvin Alvarenga

John’s words

Sunday, October 11, 2015

            Deb and I went to the movies last night. We saw, a violent, very well made, deeply cynical movie about the war on drugs along the US-Mexican border. Coming home in the taxi, I thought about how safe I feel in Nicaragua. We got home, checked our email and Facebook, and real life violence invaded our lives. We learned that Melvin Alvarenga had been murdered in Tocoa, Honduras. This brief notice appeared on a news website (http://www.canal6.com.hn/sucesos/matan-a-miembro-de-la-cruz-roja-en-tocoa-colon.html) :

Matan a miembro de la Cruz Roja en Tocoa, Colón

Un miembro de la Cruz Roja fue asesinado este sábado en Tocoa, Colón, norte de Honduras.

La víctima fue identificada como Melvin Orellana Alvarenga.

De momento se desconoce el móvil del crimen.

(They killed a member of the Red Cross in Tocoa, Colon. A member of the Red Cross was murdered this Saturday in Tocoa, Colon, in the north of Honduras. The victim was identified as Melvin Orellana Alvarenga. At this time the motive for the crime is unknown.)

Condolences were posted on his and his sister’s Facebook pages. (Death in the age of social media.)

            This is the second son in the Alvarenga family that has died. Melvin’s younger brother William was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2008 or 2009. There is one surviving son and three surviving daughters.

            Today would have been Melvin’s birthday.

            I first met Melvin early on in our Peace Corps service in Sonaguera, Honduras, sometime in 2005, when he was a teenager. Just recently Deb reminded me that we got to know Melvin because we ran into him and his father, Chema, at the Health Center. The Alvarengas are furniture makers and carpenters and Chema had cut himself badly on a saw in their workshop. He was at the Health Center to check on his stitches. This meeting led to a long friendship and work relationship that lasted far beyond our Peace Corps service in Honduras.

            The Alvarenga family is very involved in community service, particularly through the Catholic Church and the Red Cross. Melvin and his younger brother William were part of a youth group at Cruz Roja. Deb and I were invited to train the group in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. For the next two years, this group of young people, especially Melvin and William, were involved in much of the HIV/AIDS education that I did in Sonaguera and other locations in Honduras. We visited the family often and Melvin and William stopped by our apartment frequently. (The memory just came to me of the brothers leaving our house after a visit. Melvin started pedaling the bike with William running beside him. Then William jumped onto the crossbar and took over the steering while Melvin continued to pedal, his hands resting on his brother’s shoulders. Now they are both gone.)

            After our Peace Corps service, before the military coup that deposed the president and destabilized the country, before Honduras descended into drug and political violence to become the most dangerous country in the world, Deb and I went back to visit three or four times. On one of these trips we visited William’s grave with the family. Another time we took a small group of high school students from The Met School on a two-week learn/serve trip. I arranged for Melvin and another young Honduran man to travel with this group. (Another memory: On the trip with the high school students one of our activities was to go kayaking in a mangrove swamp. Melvin pulled me aside and confided that he couldn’t swim and that he was afraid to go in the boats. Melvin was a sweet, generous guy, but he was not without a certain level of Central American machismo, so I took this confession as a measure of how scared he was and also of his trust in me. We agreed we would share a kayak. Little by little, I watched him relax and gain confidence. By the end he was a real cowboy, racing the other boats and splashing water with the best of them.)

            Not long after we got back to the States from Honduras in 2007, I was talking to Joe Matoney, the accountant who has done my taxes for years. I told him that Deb and I were sponsoring a young Honduran man to go to medical school. It was costing us $2,000 a year for tuition, room and board, books, the whole deal. Joe said he’d be interested in doing something like that if we knew the right kid. I immediately thought of Melvin. However, when I talked to him, he said to give it to William. He explained that he had an obligation to work on a collective farm representing his family’s share in the undertaking. Besides, he said, William was smarter. (William always understood my Spanish. No matter how garbled it came out, he knew what I was trying to say and could interpret for me with other people, including his brother.) Joe Matoney gave William a private scholarship, funneled through the Catholic Church in Sonaguera, to study engineering. When William died, Melvin took over the scholarship and spent the next four years getting a business degree. He finished his studies in the spring.

            For a long time I have wondered if it was the scholarship that put William on that motorcycle in the path of a truck. Without that extra financial help would he still have been getting around on his bicycle? Now I’ll wonder if it was the scholarship that put Melvin in Tocoa, which is where he went to college. Without that extra financial help would he still have been working on the farm in Sonaguera. I’ll never know and besides nothing could make these events more heartbreaking than they already are.

            I’ll also probably never know if Melvin’s death had anything to do with the general level of violence and despair in Honduras. For five or six years, I thought of Honduras as a second home, but now it is lost to me. I want to go back. I want to tell Chema, his wife, and the other kids how deeply sorry I am and how much I loved Melvin and William. I want to go to the graves with them. Maybe I will one day, but for now I’m too afraid.

Debby’s words

John just read to me what he has written about Melvin and we cried together sharing our sadness.  22 hours before we received the news of Melvin’s death, I received a message from him on Facebook, “Holaaa! Como estan?”  {Helloooo!  How are you (plural)]. When I saw it I thought, I will respond to him tomorrow.  How typical and sweet of Melvin to communicate and check in with us.  How sorry I am that I did not know it was my last chance to communicate with him. 

John has captured many memories of both William and Melvin.  There is only sweetness in my memories of both of them.  What kind of teenage boys come to visit 60-year-old gringos and hang out for an hour or so?  They must have done that a couple of times a month. We fed them and their family and they fed us.  Once I made chocolate chip cookies with their sister and mother and Chema made us a couch.  They were all an important part of our life and community in Sonaguera. 

I remember a party celebrating Melvin and his sister Georgina’s graduation.  William did not come because someone had to stay home to keep an eye on the house and the carpentry shop.  Melvin had a girlfriend at the time and he was dancing the bachata with her.  I remember him letting his left arm hang to his side as he danced.  It must have been the cool way to dance because she did not seem to mind not being held and he was very happy. 

Melvin had some facial acne and he had heard that there were great medicines in the USA for acne.  During one of our post Peace Corps visits, he asked me if I could bring him some acne medicine.  I consulted with John’s stepdaughter Lisa Davey Ahava who is a PA specializing in dermatology and under her guidance I twice brought Melvin a supply of over the counter cleansers and creams.  He was so happy and told me they were, “Super!”  Although I could see it did clear up his face, to me he was always a handsome young man.

When Melvin joined us with the group of Met School students he was at a disadvantage because he spoke no English.  Three of the students spoke some Spanish but it did not seem to matter.  They all loved his easy going accepting manner and he was quickly part of the group, although I think it was eye opening for him to be with this group of outgoing loud American adolescents. He had questions and observations, but no criticism.

My daughter Emily recently wrote to me that a pregnant friend of hers with a 2 year old has been diagnosed with breast cancer.  I have been struggling to make sense of this news and now the realization that the Alvarenga family has lost another son is making the world feel like a very cruel place.  Melvin was a good brother, a loyal son, a dedicated community member and a great friend.  I will miss him and will puzzle for a long time about why he had to leave us so early.