Listos,
Within the next few weeks, humanitarian and volunteer workers
traveling to Honduras by air will be greeted at the country's four
major airports (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, and Roatan) by
banners thanking them for their efforts to help the people of
Honduras. Each of the blue and green "spiders" will read… "Welcome
Volunteers, Honduras appreciates your helping hands."
The campaign is an effort by projecthonduras.com and the Institute of
Tourism to begin to express their appreciation to the hundreds
(perhaps thousands) of groups that visit Honduras each year to donate
their time, expertise, experience, and talents to implement
grassroots projects to empower the most disadvantaged segments of the
country's population.
The number of individuals and organizations going to Honduras to
provide assistance has noticeably increased since Hurricane Mitch hit
in 1998… a classic example of a "blessing-in-disguise" tragedy. On
any given flight to or from the country, you can count on about one
quarter of the passengers belonging to medical brigades, church
missions, university student teams, or some other type of group
involved in social service activities.
These "social tourists" provide tremendous material and moral support
to the poor, and I think Honduras must do all it can to ensure that
they keep coming back year after year, and are also inspired to
recruit their friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances to
join them. With an enthusiastic army of tens of thousands of
humanitarian and volunteer workers traveling to Honduras each year
and coordinating via the projecthonduras.com online network, Honduras
is pioneering an alternative model of development that relies less on
financial capital and more on "human capital".
Everything possible should be done to grow this "unconventional
movement" to change Honduras for the better and enable it to exit its
cycles of bad times and less bad times. Publicly saying "thanks" is
certainly a good place to start.
Note that social tourists also spend a fair amount of money in
Honduras. We estimate that the social tourism segment of the
country's tourism market accounts for about $75-100 million in
revenue annually. Social tourists buy airline tickets, stay in
hotels, take taxis, visit museums and parks, eat in restaurants, and
purchase souvenirs.
So while it is to the advantage of Honduras' poor that social
tourists remain passionate about Honduras, it is in the country's
economic interest as well.
One of the features of Conference on Honduras in Copan Ruinas during
October 20-23, 2005 will be a Social Tourism Workshop designed to
bring representatives of Honduras' tourism industry together to
brainstorm a strategy for creating an alliance between them and
social tourists that guarantees a growing volume of business for the
former and discounted rates for the latter.
If you are interested in participating in this workshop or attending
the conference in general, please e-mail hondopost.....com or see
http://www.projecthonduras.com/conference.
Marco
To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/travel-to-honduras/
travel-to-honduras-
:
|
