It's only January 20, and I have already been to Culiacan and Mazatlan (Mexico) and Tegucigalpa, Honduras...where I have spent the past four days doing diligence on an affordable housing joint venture that our firm is considering.

For the past few years, Tegucigalpa (roughly translated: "Silver Hill") has never been too far from my mind: At work, I have picture on the inside of my office door of a child in a dump, literally competing against buzzards for food. The picture was in the LA Times several years ago, and when I saw it, I felt an instant emotional punch ("But for the grace of God, there go I"), and cut it out within seconds, something I almost never do. The dump was in Tegucigalpa, and the picture accompanied my friend Sonia Nazario's Pulitzer Prize winning series in the Times entitled "Enrique's Journey," that I mentioned on this thread previously.

This series of pictures does not include the picture that's on my door, but it actually tells the story pretty well. If you click on the link, be sure to scroll down and read the captions.

Teguc (Tuh-goose) as many locals call it, is a sprawling metropolis of about 1.2 million souls, many of whom are living in conditions ranging from extreme to mild poverty.

Two years ago, my friends M and C moved from California to a slum in Tegucigalpa in order to help people there start small businesses and improve their lives...I visited M and C yesterday in their neighborhood and it was an extraordinary experience. I remain in awe of what have accomplished. More on that later.

Has anyone noticed I'm lousy with transition in these journal entries? Hence, another list:

1. A Wing and a Prayer. The flight path into Tegucigalpa is remarkable...since the city is surrounded by hills, the approach is tricky and the pilots really earn their pay. You can look down at any given moment and see what brand of soda someone is drinking in front of their shack. The runway is short, and gives you just enough time to appreciate the long-out-of-service and severely dilapidated 1940's-era planes lined up on the tarmac.

2. Fast Food Nation. Teguc is overrun with US convenience food outlets...BK, McD's, Wendy's, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, KFC, Applebee's, TGI Friday's, Olive Garden, and more....it's a bit embarrassing. For many folks, Olive Garden (or even BK) is a once-a-year special event, for a birthday party or similar momentous occasion. I think the proliferation has to do with fast food outlets being considered "tourist-related" developments and thus eligible for some very special tax breaks. (Even though tourists who patronize these establishments are very few and far between).

3. GDP. I'm told that 30 percent of the Honduran GDP is from remittances...that is, money sent home by people working abroad. Translates to USD $3 billion dollars in annual remittances. Mind-boggling.

4. The Plus Side. Despite the grinding poverty, Teguc has a lot going for it: namely spectacular natural beauty, great weather, and not too much smog (fumes are belched relentlessly by all manner of vehicles, but the constant winds blow it out pretty well).

5. "It's near the big red building." Believe it or not, only about 25 percent of Teguc's streets are named. Utterly nuts for a city of its size. And there's no downtown with a cluster of office buildings, etc. One very sharp corporate atty (a Harvard grad, no less) we met with, had converted a house to his office...which is very common.

6. "10 Adam forty, we are en route to the scene, as soon as we feed the hamsters." Incredibly, most or all of Teguc's police vehicles are donated, meaning the police drive a ramshackle bunch of mismatched jalopies and trucks. The first police vehicle I saw was a VW bug from the early 70's that had a brutally difficult life (to put it mildly). I think the cops were about to get out and start pushing.

7. Hold Your Fire. Security guards are everywhere, but here's the somewhat open secret...most don't have bullets in their menacing-looking automatic weapons.

8. The Prison Look. Almost anyone who can afford it has concertina (aka razor) and or barbed wire around their property. Some of the wealthier folks even have a double layer of concertina wire above barbed wire, and for the triple whammy, some folks have even electrified it. Looks like thousands of mini-prisons to your gringo correspondent, but perhaps it provides comfort to the locals.

9. Mitch Devastation. Hurricane Mitch brutalized Honduras in 1998. One effect is that it eventually wiped out the Honduran stock market. Can you imagine the kind of disaster that would be required to do that in the US? I would rather not.

10. Hot for Teacher? One store near our hotel that we passed every day is called Sammy Hogar. It's a ferreteria, or hardware store. Hogar means "place" or in some cases, I'm told it can sort of mean "special place." I wonder how many Hondurans get the Sammy Hogar joke, which, come to think of it, is not that funny in the first place.

11. Get'cher Land! They ain't making any more of it! We looked at a lot of existing developments and a lot of potential sites. We saw one incredible piece of land...it's about 120 acres, in the path if development, but the buyer would need to build a road built to hook up with a main road and bring water and electricity and sewer to the site. We think we could build about 1,000 free-standing low-income homes on it, which we would hope to sell in the range of USD $13,000 each. Sounds like a good price for a house until you remember that min wage in Honduras is about USD $7 per day, but many people make more like $4.

Anyway, since I know the suspense must be killing you, I will tell you the price of the land for the site in question: About ten cents per square foot. Let me give you a not-so-comparable comp. In Manhattan Beach on the Strand (i.e., the oceanfront, which is NOT where we live!) a old scraper house on a lot that is about 4500 square feet just sold for about $9 million, meaning that before the existing home is even demolished (slated to happen soon), the buyer is into the land for about $2,000 per square foot..a mere 20,000X multiple of the Honduran land on a price per foot basis. Is one site over-valued and one piece under-valued? All I know is I'm not telling you exactly where this Honduran land is...so you don't hop the next flight to Teguc and buy the land before me!

12. This entry has gotten far too long...I was going to write about M and C, their miraculous work, and the incessant murders and other crime in their neighborhood, which seems to be in the midst of a perpetual crime wave...but that deserves its own entry on another day.

Until then, I will reflect again on my extraordinary good fortune--my safe return to the City of the Angels, and my comfortable life, and our house, which is not surrounded by concertina wire and an electrified fence.