Dreams Behind the Glass

This story has been published in the 2025 Pathfinder Issue of Hidden Compass. While every story has a single byline, storyteller proceeds from patronage campaigns in this issue will go collectively to Team Rebel Reef.

In 2010, Antal Borcsok secured his dive mask, pulled his regulator into his mouth, puffed twice, and flipped off the side of a boat into the balmy Caribbean Sea. As he waited for his wife, Alejandra Thompson, to join him, he noticed that the water wasn’t gin-clear as it was along the nearby island of Roatan, but slightly more teal. He peered down forty or so feet to the seafloor. The fishermen had told him there were “rocks” down there. But what did that mean?

Once Alejandra was in the water, they descended together. As they drew near to the bottom, vague forms resolved into mounds of corrugated brain corals, fields of dimpled white finger corals, and runways of olive and pink carpet coral. Broad sea fans waved gently in the current. Spiny sea urchins wiggled their white needles. A palm-sized black and blue damselfish rushed toward Antal’s mask, trying to scare him away. Two plate-sized queen angelfish swerved behind the thick skirts of a mountainous star coral. Antal and Alejandra had landed not on rocks, but in a fairytale.

An invisible world, just a kilometer away, is suddenly seen.

Antal and Alejandra hadn’t spent their lives in the water, so while they knew what they had seen was spectacular, they didn’t have a frame of reference for it. They both grew up in Honduras’s capital city, Tegucigalpa. When they married, the two agreed they didn’t want to stay in the big city and, after a little wandering, landed in Tela, a beach town on Honduras’s northern Caribbean coast.

That day on Tela’s reef, as the pair explored, they didn’t yet know they were looking at some of the thickest, healthiest coral left in the Caribbean.

But luckily, a few years after that first dive, they invited friends who worked in coral conservation on Roatan to come dive in Tela and help evaluate the coral. 

“They forgot about us,” Antal remembers. “They were just taking pictures.”

When the coral experts surfaced, they were ebullient. “This is the greatest reef we’ve ever visited. What’s going on? Is there more like it?” 

~~

It’s a Friday in May 2025, and in Tela, Honduras, half a dozen school buses are lined up along the fence of the Tela Marine Aquarium’s parking lot. The aquarium sits along the main highway from the major city of San Pedro Sula, about an hour and a half south, depending on car traffic and whether a pony-pulled wagon weaves in front of you.

Kids around 8 to 10 years old cascade down the bus’s steps, all wearing their school uniform, a bright red shirt with a school logo patch above the heart. Some boys wear baseball caps. Most of the girls’ hair is done in long braids tied with many colored rubber bands. 

The kids’ heads turn skyward as they pass beneath the massive skeleton at the entrance to the aquarium. She stretches the length of one of their school buses, and they point in awe at her size. Videos on monitors tell her story. Her name is La Gran Berta, or Big Bertha, and she was a fin whale, the second longest after the blue whale. She swam into Tela one winter, already ill, and spent her last days in the shelter of the bay. 

The aquarium’s founder had rescued her bones. In the video, he is dark-haired, tall, and moves with athletic ease. His focus is intense as he wires together ottoman-sized vertebrae and ribs as tall as a door, and as he directs the crane to lift them high above the aquarium’s entrance. 

Today, La Gran Berta is the kids’ first encounter with the founder’s vision of what he hopes will become their awe at the riches their sea holds. They will experience his dreams in every tank of fishes and corals, in the music he generated that surrounds them, in the artwork he commissioned that adorns the walls, and even in the woven light fixtures he selected to keep the mood elegant and elevated. But his vision extends far beyond the husbandry of corals and fishes. It’s to inspire a specific kind of orgullo: pride in being Honduran.

~~

After a week of exploring, Antal, Alejandra, and the coral conservationists began the process of protecting the newly discovered reef. It took two years to work through the local bureaucracy, and six more to get approved as a marine protected area at the national level.

But just as they thought they’d protected Tela’s reefs, Antal discovered they weren’t safe at all. A Chinese company was seeking permission to develop an iron mining operation on one of the rivers that empties near Tela Bay. 

“That was going to kill the reef basically in a year,” he says.

Working with locals, they were able to stop the mining project. But the episode was a crucial lesson: “We realized that the biggest problem was that nobody knew there was a reef there,” Antal says. 

“So, how do we take people to the reef? That was very complicated. So, we decided to start this aquarium.”

~~

Now inside the aquarium’s lobby, the school kids have quieted. Their attention is fixed on a suite of large monitors, where a well-produced video plays. Between beautiful clips of the reefs, Antal appears on the screen again, explaining what coral are — animals, despite similarities to undersea forests — and why reefs matter. Among other benefits, nearly a million species of marine life rely on coral reefs, which supply us with food and livelihoods. Watching this 15-minute video is the only entrance fee Tela Marine charges. 

“We decided it had to be 100% free because we want people to feel that it’s their aquarium,” Antal says. Also, in Honduras, radical political ideologies can make some people wary of for-profit ventures. “My wife and I think that if we start receiving money from people that are visiting the aquarium, no matter how little it is, you’ll think we’re making money off the reef. And that’ll change the message completely.” 

Working under that financial constraint is difficult. Revenues are generated from associated gift shops and a restaurant located up a set of stairs from where the students are standing. The other side of the building houses a herpetarium with colorful boas, chirping frogs, and bulging-eyed iguanas, alongside a coffee shop and event space. But in the winter months, when the rains are relentless, income slows. Antal has had to take out loans at rates as high as 50% to finance construction and stay afloat. He employs almost four dozen people, and making payroll is often fraught.

Nonetheless, the free admission accomplishes something very important. In just three years, the aquarium has become one of the most visited tourist attractions in Honduras, hosting as many as 230,000 visitors a year. Among them are over 13,000 students — like the ones now watching Antal tell the remarkable story of Tela’s rare, resilient reefs. 

When the coral experts surfaced, they were ebullient. “This is the greatest reef we’ve ever visited.”

This positive message about their country is in direct contrast to what kids, even this young, hear every day, Antal says.

“If you ask a Honduran, they’ll tell you that Honduras is the most dangerous country in the world.” He points out that several major cities in the United States (turns out there are at least nine) have higher murder rates than nearby San Pedro Sula, touted as a center of drug trafficking. 

Gesturing at one of the boys transfixed by the story of the coral reefs playing on the video screen, Antal continues. “Now, a kid, eight years old, is being fed all this propaganda that he lives in the most dangerous place in the world with the most corrupt government in the world … By the time he’s 18 or 19, he only wants to do two things: either leave the country as fast as he can or stay in the country, but not be loyal to the country. He doesn’t believe in his country anymore.” 

Antal poses a thought experiment: Imagine that Paris elects a mayor who decides Paris could make more money off the place where the Eiffel Tower is located by knocking it down and putting up a financial center. “Nobody will let him do that because the Eiffel Tower is part of Parisian identity,” Antal says.

“Our mangroves, our beaches, our reef, and our rainforest cannot be replicated ever,” he continues. “We should actually feel prouder of these natural resources than a Parisian feels about his Eiffel Tower. So, one of the things that we try to do with the aquarium is explain that we have things that we can be proud of. There isn’t any reef in the world that looks like this. So that’s how special it is.”

~~

The 15-minute video ends, and one of Tela Marine’s aquarists opens a wooden door to the lobby. She smiles brilliantly at the students and says, “¿Están listos para ver los corales y peces?” Are you ready to see corals and fish?

They respond politely, “Sí.” Yes.

She gives a mock disappointed look. “Pueden hacer mejor. ¿Listos?” You can do better than that. Are you ready?

“¡SÍ!” comes the enthusiastic reply. She swings the door open wide, and the kids file through. 

Inside, the aquarium is admittedly small by U.S. standards. Just over a dozen tanks line the walls of a single room with a meter-square touch tank in the middle. But each tank is perfectly arranged, perfectly lit, and each has a story to share. Guides explain how puffer fish blow up to keep away predators and how lion fish, though beautiful, are invasive. 

Kids’ noses press against the glass. They spot tiny shrimp inside the corals and marvel at a bright green sea anemone. Teachers press their phones’ cameras against the aquaria, magnifying a lobster’s eye, revealing the waving tentacles of the corals. 

An invisible world, just a kilometer away, is suddenly seen.

~~

Before the last few kids file through the wooden door, one looks back and notices Antal standing on the stairs behind them, observing the class as they watch the video. He’s always alert to visitors’ responses, tweaking details to make sure they’re getting the message.

The kid’s eyes open wide as if he’s just seen a celebrity. He points out Antal to his friend. It’s the man in the video.

Antal smiles back in acknowledgement, Yes, it’s me, and they share a momentary connection.

“We don’t have kids of our own,” Antal tells me, “but this is what keeps me going.”

In that student’s excitement, he sees a future where Honduran children value their natural treasures, where they grow up and invest in the country for their own children.

When Antal and Alejandra descended onto a fairytale reef, it led them on the most unexpected journey. They built a kind of castle devoted to the sea’s irreplaceable treasures. Fifteen years on, Antal knows exactly what the happily ever after is: a quiet moment that signals a monumental shift for the people of Honduras.

“The best scenario would be that Alejandra and I are really, really old,” he says. “We’re walking down the street in Tela and saying, ‘I can remember when the people didn’t care about the ocean.’”