Eddie O’Toole’s love affair with Hounduras begin decades ago, when volunteering for the Peace Corps took him from suburban Long Island to the tropical clime of Guaimaca, a community of around 21,000 roughly two hours northeast of the Central American nation’s capital.
“Catholic Church, taught me to love my neighbors, and Peace Corps taught me that Honduras was my neighbor,” said O'Toole.
The differences between the two worlds made a distinct impression on a young O’Toole.
“Guaimaca only had electricity for two hours a day, so it was all dirt floors and no paved roads," he said. "I went from a Gulf gas station in Long Island to kind of the middle of nowhere in Honduras.”
O’Toole, an auto mechanic by trade, was transformed by the experience. After seeing how much need for basic goods existed in Honduras, the culture of casual waste in the United States struck him as unjust and indefensible.
“I got back up here and went to work on a neighbor's car that had a had a huge refrigerator in the garage that he was throwing away because they changed the color of the kitchen,” O'Toole sighed.
After a stint in the Air Force led O’Toole to Pittsfield, he married and started a family. But the draw to Guaimaca proved irresistible, and O’Toole bought a school bus in Lanesborough for $500, outfitted it into a traveling home, and set off south.
“Martin Luther King, day of March of 1996 we drove out of Pittsfield and went to Honduras," he told WAMC. "We went down to spend five years, but we ended up spending 13 years down there.”
After Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in the late 90s, O’Toole pulled off a truly magical accomplishment: using a $15,000 donation, he managed to fully disassemble a building scheduled for demolition in Springfield, packed it into a school bus, transported the bus via banana boat from Delaware to Honduras, and reassembled the structure in Guaimaca. The face of O’Toole’s ongoing efforts is Pittsfield-based nonprofit Berkshire Amistad, which stores much of the equipment for donation in a warehouse near the heart of town. The charitable organization was formed in the late 70s, and O’Toole took it over in 2009.
“We do a lot right in Guaimaca, Honduras, where we have the building and the library and that kind of thing," he said. "And then we do a lot of work on the other side of the country, in Intibucá, Honduras, where we support a high school in Intibucá. But all these places we work with the we work with different clinics and when we can send equipment down, we send equipment down. Sometimes we send cash down.”
The banana boat is a crucial piece of the larger story O’Toole is telling with his donation work. He sees the exchange of underutilized equipment from the Northeast and the people of Honduras who farm, harvest, and provide the bananas and other produce the United States rely on as a tale of environmentalism, justice, and respect.
“It starts up here," O'Toole said. "We're taking care of our environment. We've got a landfill problem, and we're throwing good things away. So, this is- It starts out as an environmental issue, taking care of our land right here, and a real easy way to do it is to give it to somebody that really needs it. And if they're feeding us, then that sounds like that's a neighbor, and you're supposed to lend a hand to your neighbor. I mean, it's just a basic kind of what we're supposed to do, I think. We're not supposed to throw good things away.”
Sometimes O’Toole finds himself gathering hundreds of crutches; other times, his supply of wheelchairs is overflowing before a shipment south.
“I go around the county a couple times, three times a week, picking up hospital beds because nobody wants them, so I've been collecting them," he said. "I just sent about, I think we sent about 30- Maybe we might have sent 40, and we probably have another 40 that we can send.”
The biggest development of late is that Berkshire Amistad’s most recent 40-foot-long container shipped off to Guaimaca – door to door from Pittsfield for about $8,000 – was done entirely independently.
“It took 45 years to get everything lined up, but we have our own license to import. I used to import with a nun from Honduras," I've imported with a lot of [people], but now, this stuff is under our own name. So, now we know where every single crutch is going to go, we know where every bed is going to go. That's a huge advantage, because we'll be able to kind of let people know, you know what we did with the stuff.”
O’Toole’s dream is that the addictive reward of Berkshire Amistad’s work will rub off on everyone who hears its story.
“The next time they see another pair of crutches, they grab them, they grab a little blue tape, they tape up the top, they tape up the bottom, they put them in their closet, and they just kind of keep on collecting crutches, so that day, when I tell everybody, hey, we're doing a container next week, we're doing a container- Now, all sudden, somebody calls me and says, you know what, I got 10 pair of crutches here, I got 10 pair of crutches there. That kind of having an eye, you know?" he told WAMC. "I mean, you've seen it- You go down the road and there's a wheelchair on the side of the road. So maybe you stop, you pick it up, you know what I mean?”
