It’s lunchtime at Maritza Grande’s oceanside restaurant in the Fonseca Gulf of Honduras. She scurries from the kitchen, where she is frying fish and plantains and chopping lettuce, to the bar, where she pries caps off soda bottles. Teenage boys sit at the restaurant’s picnic tables, drinking cokes and listening to reggaeton on their cell phones while on their work break: They ferry tourists in thin motorboats from the Honduran mainland to their island municipality of Amapala in the Pacific Ocean.

At 11:30, Maritza’s husband Raul Garcia arrives. He’s on a work break, too—from his first-grade classroom at a local public school. Of the nearly 13,000 municipal residents, Raul is one of 300 who have formal employment, according to the mayor’s estimate. The majority are self-employed fishermen who make 3,500 – 7,000 Lempiras (about $167-334.00) per month. Amapala, like many Honduran communities, relies on remittances from Amapalans who leave and work abroad.

Maritza Grande and Raul Garcia Danielle Mackey

Raul slides into a barstool beside Maritza. They talk about the Honduran government’s newest development plan, an idea from New York University economist Paul Romer: Charter cities. In 2013, the Honduran government passed a law based on many aspects of Romer’s idea, which is to create autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations, instead of the countries in which they exist. The first Special Economic Development Zones (ZEDE, for its name in Spanish) is being conceived in Honduras, financed by $40 million from the South Korean government. It will likely be located in Amapala.

Maritza is unsure what to think about the ZEDEs. “I don’t know how much this project will really benefit us,” she says.

Raul shakes his head. “We need this,” he says. “Sure, it could have a dark side, but the truth is that in countries like ours—third world countries—that’s a necessary evil if we want development.”