First let me tell you about my normal life. What I "do" normally is produce television shows. And like most of us servants of the system, I live up to the money I make: I go out a lot; I drink good coffee; I have great boots. I'm a comfortable cog in the wheels of Canadian capitalism. Arguably, this is what work becomes for the middle class: greasing the wheels of comfort.

Now let me tell you about the work I'm doing right now. Here in the mountains of Honduras (warm days, cool breezy nights), I am volunteering with an indigenous rights group - lattes and boots a world away.

What I "do" now doesn't fit tidily into the typical Canadian definition of work - or into my own. It greases no wheels; produces no comforts. But it has been the starting point for a new obsession of mine: the question of what is real work and who benefits from it?

The town I live in is called La Esperanza. By Honduran standards, it is prosperous. By any Canadian measure, it is dusty and ill-equipped. Sidewalks appear and disappear at random, giving way to patches of dirt. Architecture, roads, electrical wiring are haphazard. There is a good market, where people come in shifts with covered baskets of hot tortillas, or fresh avocadoes, or cheap household items to sell. There is sweet coffee to be had, ladled from steaming cauldrons at makeshift stalls. There are children everywhere, reflecting Honduras' prodigious birth rate and, in their barefoot, wild-haired appearance, its poverty.

I work in this town at the headquarters of a group called COPINH - a Spanish acronym for the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. My job here is as human rights observer, computer-skills enabler, writer, and general link to the outside world. This group has among its ranks extremely able activists (well-travelled, risk-taking, grass-roots-focused, visionary), and at times I wonder whether they need me at all.

Work then, for me, is unpaid, floating between useful and useless, paling in comparison to the work going on all around me, which within a movement like COPINH, in a country like Honduras, is monumental. Only a very few members are paid, and a nominal salary at that. Everyone makes do with what they can and makes huge sacrifices to win better living conditions for their communities. Many lack basic amenities and are actively persecuted by corrupt police and the wealthy class for their valuable ancestral land.

My colleagues' work has little to do with greasing wheels - far more, in fact, with throwing wrenches into the system, a system that permits the comforts of our 'working lives' in the north at the expense of real development here. The jobs they hold in COPINH are elevated beyond the actual tasks they accomplish, like amassing hordes of people for demonstrations and fighting for land titles and education. Together, we are involved in "la lucha" -- I think the best translation to English would be "fighting the good fight." This notion, that work is always towards something greater, comes straight out of the repression, poverty and disempowerment of the Honduran people, most especially among indigenous groups and "campesinos" (peasants who subsistence-farm in the countryside).

Recently, during a conversation with a soft-spoken, impassioned COPINH founder, sitting in my dimly-lit room, each of us warmly dressed against the nightly cold of this mountainous area, I was told that the great power of his group's base membership is its "poverty," its lack of acquaintance with the frenzy for comfort, its willingness to sacrifice, to work not for survival, nor for the system, but for a stronger community.

My days now often include long trips to the capital city where we attend meetings with government officials. Some of us worry that the meetings are taking up too much of our time - that we are getting sucked into the "work" of the government. (We wonder what the government is actually working on when most people here aren't even provided with basic health care.) But we also know that showing up en masse, cowboy hats, peasant clothes and, in tow, one rather pale foreign observe (me!), can slowly work magic against the system.

On the way, careening around the mountainous highway, me crossing fingers and toes (this is not how I want to die!) we pass campesinos in a blur emerging from the thicket of the Honduran countryside; young men dangling machetes as comfortably as limbs, heaving sacks of corn or coffee. Without romanticizing it too much, I can attest that their work is real. Sweaty backs and dirty hands. To me, it matches the work of COPINH, if somewhat ruefully. There is little grace in their thinning shirts or their long days in the fields. But there is grace in their willingness to fight for something better, even after that exhausting day is done.

As for me, I am keenly aware that my unpaid work is actually better paid than almost everyone around me. I flew myself here; use savings to fund these months abroad.

Recently, a well-off Honduran from the capital, dramatic in speech and in presentation, pronounced that I must be making "un monton de plata" (slang for a heap of dough) here. When I told her I was a volunteer, she turned fully towards me for the first time and gaped because, of course, well-off or not, only a foreigner could afford to 'work' against the system in a country that's not even their own.

I hope it is obvious to the people around me that, faulty as it might be, this work means more to me than all the wheel-greasing and latte-buying of my Canadian life.