Liwa Mairin - The Curse of the Mermaid

Cayo Bobel is nothing more than a rock emerging from the Caribbean Sea, 50km offshore from the jungle of La Mosquitia, along the far eastern coast of Honduras, one of the last untamed regions on earth.

More than a hundred Miskito men have been living here for months, sleeping in bunk beds and hammocks under a thatched roof. Every day they dive for sea cucumbers that will be exported to Asia, where it is considered a delicacy.
The Harvest
At dawn, we embark on one of the twelve small wooden boats that comprise the fleet. The divers sail to a larger vessel offshore. The Captain Jimmy is one of the forty or so boats hunting for spiny lobsters in the Honduran waters.

For 40 years now, the Miskitos from Honduras (and nearby Nicaragua) have been considered the best divers in Central America. Every year more than 2000 of them are recruited by Honduran fishing companies to harvest lobsters, cucumbers or conch that are exported to North America or Asia. For the 2014–2015 season, Honduras exported US$40 Million worth of spiny lobsters, a quarter of which were harvested by scuba divers. Of the total catch, 95% was exported to the US. In 2013, the country exported US$200,000 worth of sea cucumber, but the figure is likely higher now.

After decades of harvesting, the spiny lobsters’ population has significantly decreased and now divers are often forced to dive deeper than 45m. As the lobsters began to disappear, opportunities for new species, such as the sea cucumber, began to emerge. Divers will typically earn between US$200 and 350 for a two-week trip, twice the minimum salary in Honduras, but good money in the Mosquitia where the education level is low and unemployment high.

After exchanging news and cigarettes with Captain Jimmy’s sailors, our boat goes on with its route, looking for the perfect harvesting spot; a sandy bottom, 27–37m deep. The diving team is composed of two divers, Renaldo, 33, and Marvin, 35, one ‘manguerista’ (‘hoseman’), Jose, 25, in charge of handling the air compressor, as well as the boatman. There are two categories of harvesting divers: the ones on diving boats use tanks; while the island ones use onboard air compressors with two 180-feet-long hoses. Team work is of crucial importance: the manguerista has to make sure the compressor works fine and adjust it to the diving depth, while the boatman must follow the bubbles.
I slide my arms into a homemade hose harness and enter the water with Marvin. The experienced Miskito diver swiftly descends to the bottom. My regulator has a taste of motor oil and my head hurts from the blazing sun and sea sickness. It is the first dive of the day and the compressor’s engine has not warmed up. I struggle for air as I fight to descend under water without any weight belt. We reach the bottom at about 25m and station ourselves four feet above the sand, looking for signs of sea cucumbers. Marvin quickly identifies his prey in the sand and plunges his long iron rod to catch it with its hook. The bottom current is strong and I am exhausted after only twenty minutes.

Marvin and Renaldo will go on for more than four hours, ascending to empty their 30kg net bags or to shout at the manguerista to give them more air when they need to go deeper. They carry no depth gauge or watch and barely ever stop while ascending.

At the end of the day, Renaldo feels pain and scratches under the skin of his left arm, the first signs of decompression sickness, just the usual routine for these men… Since 2003, more than 350 divers have died of a decompression accident (decompression illness – DCI) according the Association of Handicapped Miskito Indian Lobster Divers (AHMBLI). In 2014 alone, 11 deaths were recorded, not including men buried at sea.

The Chamber

Back in the capital city of the Mosquitia, Puerto Lempira, the only decompression chamber in this region always seems to be full. Wilfredo Martinez, the smiley and dedicated hyperbaric physician, introduces us to Freddy Firmin, 25, an injured Miskito diver suffering DCI. After seven days of diving at around 25m, he ascended, unable to move his legs. His comrades took him back under water, hoping it would reduce the size of the bubbles trapped in his spinal cord.
As this didn’t work they attempted to ward off the bad spell by using traditional herbs – some divers believe DCI is the curse of the Liwa Mairin, a siren in the Miskito mythology who protects marine life. In the end, it took Firmin four days to reach the hospital, as the boat’s Captain decided to finish the harvesting campaign first.

“Patients rarely reach [the chamber within] 48 hours,” confirms Dr Martinez. In 2014, 50 divers were left handicapped, while an estimated 3000 live in the region, according to Irish non-governemental organization GOAL Global – an international aid charity.

During the next five days, Freddy will artificially ‘dive’ at 18m, before slowly being brought back to the surface while breathing oxygen. He knows the drill – it’s his second visit to the chamber in six years. A few days later, he leaves the hospital on his two legs and chances are he will dive again.
In a nearby room, other DCI-injured divers are busy training their leg muscles to recover their motor skills. Arias Graham Patricio, 38, lies vertically, strapped on a medical bed. After 18 years of diving he finally had a stroke of bad luck at only 15m. He exited the water unable to move the right half of his body. He fell unconscious and luckily was brought back to mainland quickly by a small motor boat. He underwent three days of hyperbaric treatment and now starts the slow recovery process of learning to walk again.

His guide along this path is Teofilo Bence, a 47 year-old round-faced Miskito left crippled by a diving accident in 1993. He learned physiotherapy as he was himself being treated by a US physiotherapist and now acts as the de facto healer of the divers. “I treated thirty divers in 2014 and they all walk!” he boasts. Sure enough, Arias walks again, albeit very slowly, a few weeks later.

Being paraplegic in the Mosquitia is more or less the equivalent of a slow death sentence. Unable to work, fish or take care of the fields, the men often die of infections from sores and rely heavily on family support.

The Future

The boat owners, who are ultimately responsible for the diving conditions, very rarely assume any responsibility and at best will give the family a few hundred dollars. As for the treatment, only a third of them agree to pay the US$1000 it costs to use the hyperbaric chamber. Dr Martinez has to organise fundraisers to fill its oxygen tanks.
Every new year starts with rumours of a permanent ban on diving, but in the end, everyone knows that no one will implement any rules. In 2010 the Honduran government declared lobster harvesting using scuba would end after the 2010–11 season, but this has been extended and delayed many times. In the end, the Miskitos need the money and alternative means to make a living have not been found. Besides, the authorities have other fish to catch. In 2015 Honduras was the third most violent country on the planet (for a country not at war that is), and in 2012, according to a UN report, 86% of drug flights from South America landed first in the Mosquitia, before continuing their journey further north.

In March 2015, five of the biggest sea products companies from the US, including Chicken of the Sea and Red Lobster, signed a pledge not to purchase any lobster harvested by divers. But the promise seems an impossible one, according to Hermano Ramirez, a middleman from Panama, exporting sea products to Asia, who thinks no one will be able to track the products before they reach the factory in Honduras.

According to Seth Paisano Wood, MP for the Gracias a Dios department (the electoral region Mosquitia is in), the already precarious economy of the region would completely collapse if the diving were to stop. The future lies in economic alternatives, believes Bernard McCaul, GOAL Country Director in Honduras. For the past five years, the NGO has based its programmes on the natural skills and traditions of the Miskitos for fishing. Until now, drying and salting was the only way to sell fish outside of the Mosquitia, but new ice factories could ultimately help the fishermen sell their fresh catch within the country. New and simple techniques could also help locals to focus on other, less dangerous sorts of fishing: shrimp and jellyfish, another delicacy in Asia.

Cannonball jellyfish proliferate during the summer months and are easy to catch and process with little equipment. Many communities are already relying on it and in the village of Kaukira a co-operative factory already exports more than US$200,000 worth of salted jellyfish every year. What would be considered a poisonous plague from a tourism point of view could, in fact, be a gift for the future of the Miskitos.

The issues around diving in Honduras are complex; not just a fisheries problem, it spans multiple issues – social justice, public health. Depending who you ask, it may also present an economic development opportunity, or an opportunity for economic crisis. Multiple NGOS, aid agencies and government departments are involved in finding a solution to this problem, but its coming is slow.

For these Honduran divers, risking their own lives for those of their families is no choice at all. Until they are presented with viable options, they will dive again.