Campesinos in the Big City

Here it is, December 8th, and it was 75 degrees or so this afternoon. There have been a few cold spells, but for the most part, the Honduran "winter" has been treating us well. We have to shut our window shutters sometimes, but we try to hold out as long as we can when it gets chilly because we then have to decide between relative warmth and light. When we went to the capital for Thanksgiving a couple weekends ago, we drove through areas where the houses looked different, not necessarily in size or color or maintenance—I couldn't put my finger on it for awhile—but I finally realized that they had glass windows. That's a sign of real luxury down here; it's a little bit like Little House on the Prairie sometimes, especially when the electricity goes out.

So, as I mentioned, we went to Tegucigalpa, the capital, for Thanksgiving. The school was originally going to put together a little farm weekend getaway for us, but the road was washed out (excuses, excuses…), so they basically paid for us to spend four days in the big city. Hopefully, we'll make it out to the farm another time, but we weren't too let down in the change of plans because the city meant restaurants, movies, and grocery stores. Tegucigalpa is about 150 miles away by road, which sounds like it should be a simple trip, but of course, that wouldn't have made for a noteworthy experience. We had 14 people in a van with all of our bags on top, and we left town around 6 am after taking a mototaxi down the mountain to catch the van. We left the paved road 20 minutes later (the highway right around Gracias seems to be one of the nicest stretches in the country), and must have stopped to yell out the window and ask for directions to the next town on our mental maps at least 15 times after that. The road washes out so often that most of the so-called "highway" looks like a permanent construction site. We came to several forks that looked equally attractive, but after trying one, we'd find out that it led to just a dirt hill or a deep pit. We made a stop about halfway for some comida tipica, and then we knew we were getting closer to the city because we started seeing fast food restaurants. The American fast food places here are pretty much the same as they are in the States, except that most of them are HUGE and all gussied up. Going out for fast food is a treat for most city people, and the prices are higher than they are at home, too. The food is the same, though, except for the addition of some bean/egg/tortilla/plantain concoction at each place. We did see a mariachi band hanging out with Ronald McDonald at one place, which, from what I remember, doesn't happen back home.

We spent a few hours just walking around near our hotel and sitting with some friends at a coffee shop chain (kind of like Honduran Starbucks). It felt so surreal to be in this place because it seemed like we were back in the States. The mall and chain restaurants are such a far cry from our rural landscape that it didn't seem possible that we could still be in the same country. That night, we went to the fanciest Thanksgiving dinner I've ever been to. One of the administrators from the rich Tegucigalpa Abundant Life school hosted, and most people were wearing suits and dresses. The house was very posh, and they had obviously hired a party planner to make elaborate centerpieces out of real fruit and leaves, decorate the tables with gold chargers and glittery leaf coasters, and do the lighting scheme and background music and all. The food was very authentic Thanksgiving, though, complete with marshmallow fruit salad, which I've always found a bit odd, but it just went to show that they had pulled out all the stops. Their house, and most Honduran houses, had such a great design that blended both indoor and outdoor space. Sometimes in houses here, you actually forget whether you are outside or inside, or you can't really decide even if you think about it because the distinction is not really important here. Lots of rooms in houses are covered but there aren't really any walls or there aren't any screens, or there could be a high wall around but no ceiling, or you're sitting in a garden but it's more or less just another room in the house. I wish that the weather back home made this kind of design possible, but it's just not practical when it gets down below freezing for months at a time. I've gotten so used to being connected to the outside, though, with our pane-less windows and the courtyard with the mountain view at school, and then our porch/carport and screen-only windows at home. It's going to be an adjustment going home in a couple of weeks and hiding out in the always-68 degree-houses except when going in between buildings and the car.

Anyway, to say that we enjoyed our meal would be like saying that pie is alright. All of us foreign teachers wolfed down the cheese and nuts immediately upon arrival (we don't get those things here in Gracias), and then shamelessly stuffed ourselves, in keeping with Thanksgiving tradition. We Americans do not take our holiday feasting lightly. After our meal, the driver that the school hired to take us around the city for the weekend brought us up to a high viewpoint for a look at the city at night. It's not beautiful during the day, and it's not like a big city with skyscrapers—it really feels more like just a really huge, sprawled-out town in the mountains. At night, though, the city is just a lot of lights spread out without pattern all over the valley and climbing up onto the surrounding mountains:


On our way back to the hotel, we passed by a train made out of some cars and other assorted vehicles with Christmas lights strung out connecting them together. It was called the "Kobs Express" and apparently takes its passengers to the nearest "Kobs" (an ice cream store chain). It was kind of a mixture of a kids' train at the mall, and a college campus "safe ride" kind of arrangement.

The next morning, some of the school administrators showed us around the organization's headquarters complex. We saw the big school there, the TV station, radio station, church, and they even took us to their hearing and eye clinic. We hadn't really known much about Abundant Life, the organization that bought the school we work at here, but it was good to open our eyes to all the good that they do in Honduras. They have a nightly AA meeting in their church facility, and nothing seems excessive or wasteful—they just make the most of what they have. In other areas of the country, they also have an orphanage and an elderly care facility. It's rare to have an organized Honduran group that is working successfully toward social improvement in their own country. They do not get many donations or volunteers from wealthier countries, and although some of their top administrators have a lot of money, most of them seem to have acquired their wealth before becoming involved with the organization, and it's admirable that they want to do some good with their money. While we were at the eye clinic, I mentioned that I needed a new pair of glasses, and they gave me a free eye exam and a pair of nice new glasses that cost about a quarter of what they would have back home. Ah, American health care. I was really impressed with the doctor, the optical shop, and not just the eye care but the whole organization in general.

We saw a movie that afternoon—The Hunting Game—it was alright, but the best part was just going to a movie theater and seeing a movie in English. Most of the movies they get here are action/adventure or scary ones in English with Spanish subtitles, or kids' movies that are dubbed in Spanish. After the movie, it felt as if we'd just walk out of the theater and out into the parking lot and get into our Honda and go home to our apartment in Beverly, but we snapped back to reality when we passed by the "Kobs Express" again and the big lighted up Jesus statue on a hill right above an even bigger Coca-Cola sign (like the Hollywood sign) that became our navigational landmark in the city:


The next day, we headed for some towns outside of the city, which were pretty, but more like our everyday surroundings here than anything else. I guess at this point, we aren't the usual tourists. We did buy our fair share of souvenirs, though, and we'll see how many make it home in one piece to give away for Christmas. We also went downtown, and walked through some historic areas where the buildings printed on the money here stand. It's an interesting view to be able to just see uninhabited mountains as a backdrop to a big city:


We also walked through some seedier areas, and turned around after we crossed a bridge that apparently led to a rougher neighborhood. The discrepancy in the distribution of wealth in the city is ridiculous, but I guess most cities are like that to some extent. About half the people that live in Tegucigalpa don't even have electricity or reliable plumbing, and then there are those like the house we went to for Thanksgiving that could easily be featured in some architectural or interior design magazines in the States. Here are some of the buildings right downtown, intermixed with shops and fancy government buildings:


We didn't do a lot more sightseeing in Tegucigalpa, but we did do a lot of eating. We had Japanese food, good pizza, subs, iced coffee, ice cream, and we went crazy at some grocery stores. We found pesto, cheese, plain yogurt, and even Ghirdelli brownie mix. We got a big fruitcake wrapped up in Christmas bows as a favor from the Thanksgiving dinner, and even though we quickly re-gifted it when we went to another little get-together in the city, we somehow ended up eating the whole thing by the end of the night. We all just sat up on this rooftop that looked out over the city and felt full and relaxed and strangely urban:


The trip home was much like the trip there, with scattered butterfly-in-the-stomach moments sitting in back when we'd hit the extra-deep, unexpected potholes. Aaron did get some nice shots out the window, though:






We got home in time for dinner, and spent the next couple days trying to recover and get back to normal at school. This last part has been challenging lately, with the long break approaching, and with our administration telling us to not focus on the curriculum, but rather to just work on the Christmas program. I wouldn't mind this so much except that this is not your typical school concert or play. We are having a group of drama students from the Tegucigalpa megachurch/school come and perform, while our kids act as background dancers. We don't get to make up the dances; this has been done by people in Tegucigalpa and put onto a DVD that we had to learn with our kids. This was even more of a letdown compared with what one of the other AL schools is doing for their program: spoof songs and dances (think Weird Al) with a Christmas theme. The teacher we talked to was supposed to have his class dress as fighter pilots and sing/dance to "Manger Zone" (Originally "Danger Zone"). It's ridiculous, obviously, but at least it's not supposed to be taken seriously, and it'd be fun! As for our extravaganza, each class has spent at least one class period every day since Thanksgiving working on their dance. My class is combined with the notoriously wild second graders (not that mine are angels on their own, either) for a total of 29 kids dancing to about an 8 minute song that I only know half the words for. Wrangling them for each practice session definitely takes both of us teachers, and most of the dance suggestions and critique on our part goes something like, "Stop running!" "No maracas right now!" "Stop touching him!" or "Hey, come back!"

We had a half day practice at the church auditorium in town where we'll be performing, and we have more tomorrow through Friday. Before we had the first practice day, we had a staff meeting to discuss what and where this would be happening. Someone naively asked for the address. There are no road names or numbers in town. I don't really know how people get their mail—we just get ours because there are so few Gringos around that we're easy to identify. Explaining the location of the church took at least 3 or 4 drawings on the board, about a dozen landmarks thrown out in reference, such as "the big market," "the big speaker store," and "the Garage of Flavor (Garaje del Sabor)." The discussion lasted a good 25 or 30 minutes, and after draining our attention spans, we were satisfied with the only directions for the practice given as "We will have snack rotations." A few of the highlights from practice day:

-Seeing what the kids brought from home for snacktime. One 45ish pound kid brought a hamburger, jello, candy, and a pint-and-a-half size peach nectar, which must have had at least 75 grams of sugar alone.

-One of the other foreign teachers was stung by a scorpion. This was obviously not a good highlight, but we did find out that unless you are allergic, it's just like getting a terrible bee sting that we hear burns like fire.

-Playing rock, paper, scissors, doing yoga moves with my kids, having my eyes covered and trying to guess whose grimy hands were on my face (usually I didn't know the kid's name because they were in another class), and watching Aaron's kids do tryouts for an air guitar solo that he's supposed to have in his dance. 4 hours of chaos and no one was hurt!

Here are some of Aaron's kids hamming it up off-stage during some of the plentiful down time:


Friday is the big performance night, so we'll have just 3 more days of class after that! The program is being broadcasted internationally on some Christian Spanish channel, so if you have a cable or satellite package with a lot of channels that you have never watched for more than 3 seconds, you might be able to see us at some point! Not sure about what the channel is called, but I'm guessing it will be aired sometime between 1 and 5 am on a weekday.

Besides the program, though, we've been able to do a few Christmasy things. We've taught our kids lots of Christmas carols, decorated our classrooms, done a little Christmas shopping, and been around lots of trees and lights in town. We went over to our friends' house for dinner the other night and even had some homemade eggnog. They make a really good milk-cinnamon-rice punch for Christmas here, too, which I hope to learn to make. Most of our neighbors are fattening up their chickens for their big meal in a couple of weeks, and they make tamales and go to church, but it's not as big of a commercial holiday as it is in the States. I don't think anyone wishes for snow, either. I have to say, I get a little satisfaction from listening to the Chicago and Boston NPR stations and hearing the weather there, and then going outside in my t-shirt for a walk down to the river or a nap in the hammock.

Lately, we've been to town more than usual. We had practice down there Friday last week, so we got our grocery shopping done a day early and hiked home under a bright moon. We did have a brush with danger on our way, though! We got to our friend/pulperia (tiny convenience store out of someone's house) owner, Jesus's house, and he stopped us for a chat. Some guys drove by in a pickup, and then stopped a few feet beyond the house. We weren't sure what was going on, but after a minute, Jesus asked us if we wanted to see a huge snake on the road where we had just walked. We went down to where the pickup was stopped, and there was indeed a HUGE snake lying in the road! It was probably there when we walked by, and we hadn't even seen it! The guys in the pickup had apparently stopped and thrown rocks at it to kill it because it's so deadly. I'm not sure why they didn't just run over it in the car, but I guess someone was a pretty good shot, and then they just pitched it over the rock wall and went on their way. Jesus told us that if we had been bitten, we "would have immediately died." Needless to say, we kept our eyes peeled the rest of the way home.

On Saturday, we took a day trip to La Campa, a picturesque little town just 10 miles away from Gracias. We'd been there once before, but some friends wanted to go, and we figured it'd be fun to go again, take a little hike, and get some more pottery. There's only one bus per day, and we didn't even know when it left, so we just walked along the road a little ways and got lucky within a couple of minutes when a missionary van picked us up and gave us a ride there. We walked along the river there and into the canyon a little ways once we got there. The rocks were carved out in such beautiful patterns, and they were all studded with fossils.

Here's a picture at the river:


We went to a little pottery museum to see how the Lenca people make the pottery, just out of a mixture of the dirt found in the area. They just fire them in a bonfire, and they've been making them the same way for generations. Some people use a wheel now, but for the most part, they haven't changed in their design or function. La Campa is so quiet that it's hard to tell if anyone is really there. We did manage to find the one restaurant in town, though, and it was one of the nicest settings we've eaten in. Like most of the comedors, we had to confirm with them that there was actually food available, to which the answer was, "yes, tacos," but the patio and the quiet breeze and views were beautiful.

Here's a view from a church overlooking the town:


And here's a man napping and sunning himself in a pile of beans...proof that there is life in La Campa, however quiet it may be.


We got lucky on the way home, too—we only waited for 5 minutes or so before a pickup stopped for us and brought us back to Gracias on the winding road around Celaque, the mountain that's our home.

One of the pictures taken from the jalon (pickup) ride...you can see one of the classy cow stickers in the window and and mountain ahead. It was NOT easy to take pictures in the back of a truck on a bumpy road! The driver was nice, though, and handed back some pixie stick sugar in a plastic orange for us to eat/have blown all over our faces in the wind.


We ended up staying in town late (haha, 8:30 is late for us here!), so a friend's parents who were in town lent us their truck to drive home for the night. It was so weird to ride in a truck with just us, and I hadn't worn a seatbelt since the plane ride in August!

Sunday we brought the car back, and continued our lucky transportation streak. A friend offered us her horses since they needed to go back to Villa Verde, where she keeps them and where we live. They weren't fast horses by any means, but it was a nice change of pace, and it's amazing how different the same scenery looks from just a few feet higher, when you can see over stone walls and don't have to watch the ruts and rocks under your feet. Our friend's dog followed us home, too, since she loves barking at the horses, and so it was nice to have a dog on loan for the night.

That just about brings everything up to date! If you've made it through the whole entry, congrats and thanks! Just one more week of classes, a few days at the beach, and then we'll be home! We'll be in Chicago until the 28th, then a quick stop in Indianapolis, down to Virginia for some time down there, and then up to Boston for a couple of days before we fly back here to start back up (after having a bug massacre to reclaim our house!). We miss you and think about our friends and family all the time. Hope you are enjoying everything that comes with the holidays, and maybe we'll see you soon!!

Free furniture and feedback

A nice picture Melanie took up in the park. The pictures this week are kind of random as they are leftovers from before, just think of them as B sides.


Thanks for the comments on the blog, we really enjoy reading them but haven’t figured out yet how to respond to them.
We were supposed to spend this coming weekend at the farm of the pastor of our organization but since the road is impassable we’re heading to Tegucigalpa, the capitol, for a Thanksgiving dinner (there will be turkey!!!) with lots of people from the organization. Although the farm would have been really nice and relaxing, it will be nice to go to the big city. We really haven’t been to a city since we’ve been here, so all of the noise and pollution will be quite exotic to us. Supposedly there are really big grocery stores, we can go to the movies, and check out some museums as well. We’re really going to miss having Thanksgiving (or two or three of them) with everyone, but it is really nice of the people high up in the organization to include us and do this for us.
So Thursday morning we’re going to take a moto-taxi from our house at 5:30 and then cram 14 people into a minivan for the five hour trip. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Last weekend we didn’t really do too much; we had our town day and then on Sunday we did our laundry and went for a bushwacking hike up to a knob that sticks out of the mountain above our house. We had to take off our shoes a couple of times to ford the river but after some steep climbing and some keen navigation we were perched on top of the ledge with, if not for the fog, what would have been a beautiful view of the valley below us. We still got a really good view of our “neighborhood.” It looked so lush from up there and we could see everything with acute detail, even Melanie’s pants drying in the wind.


Not really a great photograph but if you look closely you can see lots of birds nests that look like slings. The birds make these hanging baskets out of all sorts of things and you see them hanging from powerlines and lots of trees.

We also went to town last Wednesday to catch the soccer game between Honduras and Mexico. It was a huge game, as the winner got to go to the World Cup and its a big rivalry to begin with. We watched on the big screen at the posh hotel in town with some of the other teachers and a lot of Hondurans, all wearing jerseys and flags. Everyone was cheering and cussing in unison and a huge cheer went up in the 60th minute when Mexico scored an own goal. The whole place went crazy and fireworks were going off all around town. We left before the end of the game for our five mile walk up the mountain in the dark but we were able to watch the game all the way out of town because every house had it on. When the game ended and Honduras had won, everyone poured out of their houses and into the backs of pickups or motorcycles. Whenever Honduras wins this happens; everyone in town hops into the "parade" that circled the highway around town. Pickups would be loaded down with 30-35 people in the back with everyone screaming and motorcylces weaving in and out everywhere and people trying to hop into the back of the already full pickups. It was quite a celebration and got us energized for our hike.
This past week was a pretty normal week at school but on Saturday we had our first parents’ day. We weren’t really that nervous after all of our parents’ days at Landmark but there is still a certain excitement about meeting the parents. Melanie didn’t have a translator so she got a chance to practice her Spanish, but I was in need of one so that I could say more than “Good,” “Not good,” and “Its cold outside.”
My conferences went really smoothly. Everyone was really supportive and pleased with how things were going for their children, or with the prospect of their kid getting some extra help. We’ve been pushing the office to work out the logistics for having students stay after school for some tutoring and it seems like it might happen soon after getting the parents to start persuading them as well. There was pretty much the same range of parents as there is in the States, ranging from “Hi” “Thanks” “Bye” to questioning specific questions on homework problems their kid did. The most mentionable moment from my conferences was when a parent told me that her daughter wasn’t allowed to sing in the Fiesta Tipica because they said that her voice was too low. It was really sad, the student has so much energy and to be rejected for trying to sing in 4th grade seems wrong. The chorus that performed at the Fiesta Tipica sure didn’t sound that great, and what does it matter in 4th grade anyway if a kid isn’t going to be in the Met? Melanie had a couple of funny moments. One parent came in and listed the ten or twelve kids that had stolen pencils from her kid and another wondered why she was allowing the other students to tell her daughter that she looks like an old lady with her hat on (which she does).
Here is a picture of a couple of my kids at the river. It reminds me a lot of Tom Sawyer, you can see the pure adventure and curiosity in their body language.



We finished conferences a little after noon and then caught a ride down to town to do our shopping and such. We got all the stuff we needed for the short week and then relaxed for a little bit at Guancascos before we made the trek up the mountain.
It’s crazy the connections you make down here. A couple of weeks ago we met someone who taught at the school a couple of years ago who went to college with people we knew at Landmark. This weekend when were at Guancascos, we met some people from North Carolina and one of them actually works in the department at UNC, one of the schools where Melanie is applying for grad school. I don’t think the world is small by any means but it is really amazing how everyone’s lives intertwine.
The other big happening of the weekend was a new furniture acquisition. There is a serious lack of comfortable seating in our house and I’ve been trying to think of a remedy for a while. I wanted to make a couch but couldn’t really think of what materials to use. Finally, after looking around our house and some recycled furniture websites, I realized I could use the door that was serving as a support for our “closet” in our spare room. I pirated some wood some other projects and some logs from the champas (huts) of the Fiesta Tipica to fashion a verrrry rustic couch/sofa. With a little help and the tools of a student who is our neighbor, we put together something that might be made by some shipwrecked carpenters.



We’re going to pick up a mattress this weekend to throw on it and we’ll post a picture next time of a more polished version.
Thanks again for reading and we can’t wait to make our trip back to the States in a few weeks. It is just so nice to think of seeing people that we love and miss and get fattened up a little bit to fit into my clothes.

fiesta now, siesta later

For those of you folks with Landmark experience or just experience hearing us whine about duty at Landmark, this weekend left us about as exhausted as a duty weekend. The amount of time at school didn’t compare, but just the lack of time off was reminiscent of those days. On Saturday, we had a cultural festival at school. It was supposed to take place during September around Independence Day, but it got rescheduled for November awhile back. Anyway, the preparations started at the beginning of last week. The parents were instructed to build huts in the courtyard of the school. I was decorating my classroom (for the mandated Thanksgiving decoration deadline, celebrating a holiday that no one here celebrates) while the parent meeting about these huts was going on, and besides a few questions that had to be answered, such as, “What is a champa (hut)?” and “Where do we get this wood?” they pulled it all off pretty seamlessly. These huts, as you can see in the pictures, are definitely Gilligan’s Island or Survivor quality, and the parents built these in just a day with just machetes, rope, and farmland/the national park to provide them with trees and grasses to cut down. If someone told a PTA committee in the States to build a bunch of huts by next week, I’m pretty sure a lot of time would be spent in Home Depot, and I’d be surprised if they got done at all. Here, 6 huts in a day with no supplies or tools? No prob.

Here are a couple of the finished huts. Thank goodness the courtyard is dirt, or I'm not sure how the post could have been hammered in!

A few girls doing last-minute decorating in the huts...everything had to be perfect!

Aaron and his fourth graders got to decorate the drink and dessert hut that they're in:


Someone brought in a real live chicken just to tie up inside for authenticity's sake.

Besides the huts, most of the other preparation at school involved the older kids and preschoolers practicing their dances and decorating the huts. It all sounds harmless enough, but since the school all opens into a common courtyard, and since they practiced during classes in the morning and afternoon almost every day, by the end of the week we had seen and heard the dances at least several hours’ worth each. I don’t have to wonder now where carnival music comes from…I’m pretty sure it originated in traditional Honduran dance music. Imagine trying to have class as usual in a classroom full of third graders whose attention I normally only hold by a thread while music is playing (on repeat, I might add), people are dancing what Aaron affectionately calls “the pee dance” (it does look like they need to go to the bathroom), and people are building thatched huts outside. It was hard for me to follow my thoughts; for my kids, learning was a lost cause last week. The actual academic classes with the 7^th and 8^th graders were basically nonexistent because of dance practice and hut building, and the 3^rd graders were ready to riot because they didn’t have any kind of role in the whole ordeal. On Friday, we banded together with the 2^nd graders, the other misfits of the cultural fest, and we took over the vacant hut to decorate.

It was interesting to note the different values placed on this whole production. Back home, the most important part of an event like that would be that everyone participated and that parents would be able to see their child’s contributions. Here, the end goal was to have huts and dances that looked as polished and authentic as possible. For this reason, the older kids were overloaded with beans to glue onto cardboard vases and songs to learn on their recorders, while the younger kids (besides the preschoolers, who have their cuteness to offer) were left on the sidelines because their involvement could only mean trouble. This is a biased opinion, of course, coming from a teacher of those sidelined children, but it does reflect a cultural difference in presentation. In Honduras, presentation is huge. When we do our bulletin board decorations, for example, it’s only the foreign teachers’ doors that display work done by our students. This is, in part, because we don’t want to spend our planning time painstakingly cutting out letters and tracing pilgrims and turkeys and such to stick on our doors and walls, but it is also because we want our students to have ownership of and pride in their classroom. The Honduran teachers don’t see it this way. To them, the decorations should look impeccable and festive, and the hours of cutting out shapes and making tape balls are worth doing in order to have a beautiful wall and door. Here, they’re just used to doing things by hand, whether it’s building a hut, doing repairs, washing clothes, making tortillas, or planting crops. Back home, we have lots of conveniences to speed up these processes, so we’re used to valuing efficiency. Neither way is better—they probably see our way as somewhat lazy, and we tend to just see the wasted hours in theirs—but it’s just one of the little differences that lends itself to both miscommunication and adaptation.

The big day finally came on Saturday morning. We got there early so that we could get into our festival garb: a cowboy hat and bandana for Aaron, and a giant, heavy purple dress for me. Here are all the female teachers dressed up like hibiscus flowers:

The dress (I'm in the purple) was at least as heavy as my wedding dress, and not nearly a
s fitted, so I tripped over it all over the place while moving tables and serving food. Before the food, though, the kids put on a little dance show, and a selected group of students played their recorders and/or sang. For the most part, the dances were pretty entertaining, although I think we all knew them by heart just from having the constant practice going on throughout the week. The dud act was definitely the “Pretty Indian” pageant, though. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some little girl beauty pageants, but one girl from each grade dressed up in a homemade dress and paraded around very slowly while someone narrated a detailed description of their dress. The dresses themselves were impressive—they were all decorated in a traditional theme with beans and corn glued on in the shapes of the state, different kinds of grains and produce, and other symbols of Honduran culture. The narrator took a lot of the fun out of each dress, though, by giving a standard description for each one that went something like, “In the front. You can see. Corn. And. Beans. Two of the most important crops. In Honduras.” Here is a picture of the fourth grade "Pretty Indian":

This pageant went on for a solid hour, and there were only 10 girls. After all of that, though, it was time to sell and eat food.

At each hut, the teachers (and some of the more assertive parents) served a different kind of food—tamales, typical lunch plates, drinks, desserts, and all sorts of dressed up tortillas and beans. I felt kind of sick that day, so I can’t speak much for the food, but I heard it was very good. Desserts and drinks seemed to be the big sellers. They had all sorts of fruits in a heavy caramel or honey syrup, rice pudding, and drinks included horchata and lots of kinds of fruit juices. The kids ran around a bit, parents mingled, we cleaned up and changed back into our own traditional jeans and t-shirts, and walked back home to collapse into a nap for a few hours.

This is one of my students, Lorean, twirling in her dress. The girls loved dressing up in their outfits. The boys had more fun with their homemade wooden painted machete accessories.

Paola and Francisco...two more of my third graders. Notice the big hair extension. This is part of the getup; it looks a lot more obvious on the four year-olds, since it goes down almost to the ground on them!

Sunday was our Saturday this week, with a trip into town, shopping, playing some wiffle ball with a few of our kids and a couple of peace corps volunteer friends, and then we were lucky enough to catch a ride back to our house in a friend’s pickup. All in all, not a bad weekend, but busier than usual, and it was hard going back to school Monday. This week has started off with us both feeling pretty positive about our classes, though, which always makes the days go by faster and more enjoyably.

A couple of little tidbits to add:

1. We were very excited about the election last week, and Aaron made sure that his 7^th and 8^th graders knew what was going on with it for his History classes. It wasn’t as big here as in the States, of course, but everyone at least knew that Obama won and that he is the first black president of the U.S. We wish we could have been home for it, but we listened to plenty of NPR streaming on the web (in spurts of internet strength) and watched the CNN updates on the website. We did vote absentee, but who knows if our ballots made it back home in time to count!

3. Our oven broke for the third time last week. We’ve both gotten good at problem solving here, but Aaron’s in charge of the oven, and this time was a tricky one. He figured out, after a couple of hours that we’d probably both rather forget about, that if we tipped the oven over on top of a couple of chairs (thank goodness it’s lightweight) he could fiddle with it better that way. He managed to reconnect the gas line that way, and our oven is on its 3^rd life now. It wasn’t anywhere near new when we got it, though, so who knows how many trials it’s suffered over its years.

4. For Thanksgiving, the school has offered us the organization’s pastor’s farm to stay at for a few days. They’ll cook us a feast and we can relax there, explore, ride horses, and best of all, not have to take any buses or pay for this little getaway, saving us all the headaches of other travel. It’s really nice of them to offer, and it’s just 2 weeks away! We wish we could be home, of course, but that’s only 5 weeks away!

5. Sometimes we're just still in awe of how beautiful this place is. We went to the river after school today, for example, and I just kept thinking how lucky we are to actually live here. The river is great to take advantage of for easy class field trips, too...I went a few weeks ago, and Aaron went last week. The kids love it there, and it's so great to be able to take them somewhere fun and outside of the classroom, even if they don't get out of their uniforms:

5. We missed two of our grandparents’ birthdays…Papa and Grandma Lou, I wish we could have been with you both to celebrate! We’re lucky to have both of you in our lives.

Thanks for reading! If you have Skype, say hello to us sometime and maybe we’ll get a good enough signal to talk!

San Juan de Intibuca

This is us, wet and happy in front of one of the waterfalls we went to.

Since we’ve been in Honduras we haven’t been inside of a car. We’ve been in the back of a lot of trucks, on lots of crowded buses, but we haven’t experienced the serenity of a sedan in quite a while.

Quick internet update: We have Skype now and although the call quality is not always the best it’s a way you can talk to us for free. Just look up aaron.sebens and see if we’re on.

School is going pretty well for both us right now. There are a lot of frustrations with the administration of the school, but both of us are feeling more comfortable with our classes. It is not easy by any means but I think our expectation of each day is less abstract and confusing than it was before. There are just certain things that you have to let go of and certain things you come to expect. Some examples:

- Whenever things get settled the administration likes to throw us a new “curveball” to keep us on our toes. A couple of weeks ago it was that we can’t mention Halloween in our classes and that we can only give tests that are copied from the curriculum. This isn’t really plausible as most of the students don’t really understand a lot of written directions and the tests are pretty complicated English. Last week we found out that we can’t make any photocopies except for the tests from the curriculum. I think this edict was two-pronged, that they didn’t like what we were copying and that they didn’t like spending time making copies. If only we could make our own copies like we’ve been asking for all along.

- The Social Studies teacher for fourth grade had the students build various volcanoes of Central America and bring them to class. The volcanoes ranged from a coke bottle with a cone of paper wrapped around it to an elaborate molded concrete and clay masterpiece with plastic horses and peasants unknowlingly wandering the countryside with no idea their world was about to be destroyed by vinegar and baking soda. They were supposed to be specific volcanoes but as you can guess Atitlan in Guatemala looked the same as Celaque in Honduras. My kids were really proud of them and spent most of the day guarding them like hawks against assaults of fingers from the students in other grades. I assumed that it was common knowledge that the ingredients for a good volcano were baking soda and vinegar. Not so. One kid showed up with a bottle full of gasoline (Did his parents give it to him? Did he siphon it from the bus?) thinking that was the best option for fake lava.

This past weekend we had an extra day off so we decided to spend a little time away from Gracias and see a different part of the region. Our limited travel capacity was mentioned earlier so our destination this weekend was San Juan. As you can guess there are like 200 towns called San Juan in Honduras but this one is only 35km to the east of where we are. It is a town of about 1000 people in an expansive flat valley amongst the mountains and canyons. As a town it doesn’t have too much to offer, dusty without any exotic stores or goods. It does have a couple things going for it though. The surroundings are beautiful. Although it is not that far from where we live and it’s pretty much the same set of mountains, it has a different blend of soil, rocks, and plants that make it distinctively stunning. There are large veins of rock that run through the ground so that you walk for a while on the road and then the road turns into solid rock, which saves a lot of paving. There is also actually a good deal of grass which you don’t see too often around here because of the dense foliage and farming. With the grass there were lots of cows set against the backdrop of 200 foot canyons at 8000 ft, so hopefully the picture is starting to form in your head. If not here are some pictures:

The other big thing that the town has going for it is a tourism cooperative. Several people in the town have banded together to try and promote this tiny town as a tourist destination and a better way of life for some of its residents. San Juan is a big coffee producing area and coffee pickers get paid about $4 a day. It’s kind of hard to figure out who is really at fault for the low wages here. The growers get paid $1.25 for a gallon of coffee beans, so they can’t pay the pickers much. It seems that the people who are really raking it in are the wholesalers here and the roasters and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts in the states. Through the tourism cooperative they offer several different tours to the waterfalls and canyons around the town, but they also have some interactive craft demonstrations you can do like learning how to roast coffee or making ceramic roofing tiles and adobe bricks.

To get to San Juan we decided to take the bus, which is usually a pretty safe but slow bet. We got to the bus station right before it was supposed to leave but we didn’t depart for about 30 minutes so we were crammed in a microbus with not much air and a lot of people. The seats are soooo close together on those little things. My back is pushed against the seat and knees pushing forward on the seat in front of me, not that comfortable especially when there are three other people in the seat with you that can’t move at all.

When we got to San Juan we asked around until we found the Visitor’s Center, aka electronics store. The lady in charge wasn’t there so we just paged through the book of what the cooperative had to offer. As part of the cooperative, lodging is arranged at a hospedaje, or someone’s house with a few rooms open. Although they might not always be the most comfortable beds or cleanest bathrooms, they offer so much that hotels and motels can’t. Our hospedaje in San Juan was with an 80 year old woman named Dona Soledad in a beautiful worn rundown colonial house. One really nice thing about a lot of the houses here is that the center of the house is indoor and outdoors. Most of the time is spent either in the kitchen eating food/ making it or on the porch, which is really just more of an unenclosed room. We are always just like “sheesh, we need one of these on our house,” but it just wouldn’t work in any place north of Florida.

Nice relaxing porch (we're sitting on a sofa taking the picture)

We dropped our bags off at the house and went to cruise the town while waiting for the tourism lady to get back. We found some pretty overboard concrete art in the plaza and then set our sights on a big grassy hill outside of town.

Concrete serpentine railings:

We didn’t really know which muddy road would lead there so just started asking people “How do we get to that hill?” Bit by bit we moved in the right direction, getting reassurance from people in their houses around the countryside. We were getting closer when we met three kids who were actually heading to the same place with their three cows. We passed by some really picturesque fields and fences and finally made the summit of the hill.

There were really nice views of the whole area and you’ll hear more about our trip, but this was my favorite part, just being up on this hill before sunset throwing a Frisbee around with some very curious kids. Here is me showing a kid how I can throw the Frisbee to the house we’re staying at 3 miles away:

And here are a couple of pictures around the fire tower:

We ran down the hill with the kids and their dogs and headed back to town to meet with the tourism lady. We scheduled a tour for the next day to a nearby waterfall had some comida tipica (eggs, rice, beans, tortillas) at a comedor, read and turned in earlier than our 9:30 usual. We got up, had some comida tipica and met our guide for the day. It was raining a little bit but that didn’t dampen our spirits. Our guide was really nice and used an easy to understand version of Spanish/ acting things out and led us through all of the mud up the hills towards the waterfall. He was a good guide, lots of funny stories and info about the plants. I found a queen ant from a car sized ant hill wandering around and our guide picked her up with his finger and let her bite him for our pleasure and with her huge pinchers she drew blood. Melanie and I were kind of like what is this guy doing, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. We asked him what the queen was doing out of her lair and he said “Going for a walk.” We walked through lots of coffee plantations and banana plants and found out that there is a type of banana that turns red when it is ripe (kind of funny for any Mitch fans out there). We tried some raw ripe coffee which is bright red and really sweet. It tastes a lot like honeysuckle.

Our guide scared off some apprehensive looking cows with a stick and we proceeded to slide down a couple of cow fields to the first of four waterfalls. We’ve seen a lot of waterfalls and it wasn’t anything earth shattering, but it was really pretty and had a nice chest rattling sound with the excess rain water that has fallen the last few weeks here. It was probably 40 ft tall with a nice looking pool at the bottom, but with so much water it was a little dangerous for swimming and it was cold and raining. We walked up to another waterfall that was actually two, and then a final one that was probably 70 ft tall. The waterfalls were really nice but I think the best part was the walk back, on a less muddy road that wound through the countryside. We stopped at his brother’s house and just sat and talked while his five kids peeked shyly at us from behind the door. He told us after we left that the kids are really excited to see foreigners.

Our guide told us that we were going to a nice lookout. It turns out the nice lookout was the same hill we had been to the day before. I wasn’t that happy about it since we had paid this guy to show us some new places and even though we asked not to go to the same place he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. At least it was a nice place to begin with, so it wasn’t a bad place to see twice.

We made it back to town for the coffee roasting demonstration with the older woman we were staying with. She was a teacher for 25 years and ran the local elementary school so everyone in town still calls her teacher. It was nice talking to her, sitting around the fire listening to the coffee beans pop as they changed from “gold” coffee to black. Here are a couple pictures of the roasting and different ages of coffee beans throughout the year. We couldn’t grind the coffee then because it was way too hot but I think the experience and the good tasting coffee have started me down the slippery slope of being a coffee drinker.

Here is a picture of Dona Soledad roasting coffee and then each of us giving it a spin:

The different stages of coffee:

We headed over to the same comedor for dinner, caught a little of the World Series (I was very excited) and headed back to the hospedaje. It turns out the comida tipica was a little too much after 6 straight meals of the same thing. Melanie was sick pretty much all night and the next morning we just wanted to get home so we decided to hitch hike rather than wait around for the bus. Dona Soledad at the hospedaje was really nice though. Melanie told her that she didn’t think her stomach could handle comida tipica for breakfast and she asked Melanie if she had diarrhea, which seems to be a pretty common and approachable topic here, and made her a stiff concoction she said would fix things right up.

We walked down the highway a little ways and caught a ride within 5 minutes. Hitchhiking is more than just common here, it has a pretty equal market share with bus travel as the main mode of transportation. We hopped into the back of a pickup (turns out this guy must have been a race car driver in a past life) and made the hour and a half trip back to Gracias in 30 minutes. Wasn’t the best thing for our stomachs, but it was much better than being crammed on the bus. We did our weekly shopping, got a motortaxi back to our house in the rain since we had so much stuff and breathed a big sigh of “Glad to be back” when we got home. It was nice to go away, but it is so nice to come back to our quiet comfortable house after traveling.

Three weekends...

In front of an old colonial church in La Campa, a little village 10 miles from Gracias



Another church there...

A couple of weekends ago, we spent the day with a family from school. The parents both work in the school, and their 3 kids are all students—the youngest is in Aaron’s 4^th grade class. They made us lasagna, we brought some cookie dough to make cookies with them (with our chocolate chips that came as a gift in the mail!). Jamie speaks English really well, but her husband doesn’t really speak any, so we kind of went back and forth between Spanish and English. After lunch, we rode with them out to a village called La Campa. We had been planning to bike the 10 miles there at some point, but it was great to ride there, for both the company, the convenience, and the opportunity to transport the pottery that we bought there back to our house. The town is just a tiny place, but they’re famous in the region for their traditional pottery, which is all handmade, without even a wheel. It’s simple but beautiful and functional, and we definitely stocked up due to the bargain prices (even though they’re geared toward tourists, a nice mug costs $1 and a nice casserole dish costs $2). So we bought some pottery, walked around, looked in an old colonial church, and rode back home. When we do decide to ride our bikes out that way, it’ll be a challenging 10 miles of dirt road, hills, and river crossings sans bridges. It’ll be worth it though, for the mountains and scenery.

One of my favorite parts of the town was a big spraypainted sign up on one of the cliffs overlooking the town that said “Bienvenidos a La Campa.” It was hard to tell whether the project was sanctioned by the tourism committee or just made by a friendly La Campa resident:

We spent last week in Gracias and around our house. We planted some seeds to start a vegetable garden (thanks again to a present in the mail!), and the green beans have since sprouted and are going strong. We’re still waiting on the others…we got a ton of rain in the last couple weeks, so hopefully they’ve survived. We went to town and did our usual shopping trip, and even found some apples for a good apple pie. We stopped at our usual bread store (more of a restaurant/store/house of a lady that sells bread sometimes as well), but for the 3^rd week in a row, she didn’t have wheat flour. She did have some make us some very tasty ponche de leche (milk punch…sounds weird but it’s like really thick, warm porridgey and sweet milk). The only places you can get wheat flour in Honduras are Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, the two major cities. The closer of the two, San Pedro Sula, takes about 4 hours to get there, so it’s a pretty major endeavor to buy the flour she needs. A lot in Honduras works this way…you can find most things you need in the major cities, but really just the basics make their way to stores outside of those two places. When people want to go to the mall, for example, they make a weekend of it and go to one of the cities. Other big draws in the city for people here include Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, Dunkin Donuts, and some WalMart type store called something else. Needless to say, those aren’t big magnets for us, so we don’t really have any reason to go there besides the airport.

We decided to stay in town late Saturday to watch the Honduras v. Canada soccer game, which was a very big deal. I felt like an outsider all day for not having a blue and white jersey or t-shirt on! We went to a restaurant, ordered pizza with some other Gringos, and watched the game. In the back room, there was a big projector screen setup, with maybe 200 chairs and at least 300 people. After every goal, fireworks went off around the city, and everywhere we could just hear people screaming and celebrating. We had to walk home in the dark afterward, but it was to the background sound of a giant Gracias party going on because Honduras won! Actually, we really lucked out for the walk home because the moon was bright and the sky was clear, so we didn’t even need to use our headlamps to get up the mountain.

This weekend was another “typical” one…after 9 weekends here, we’ve gotten into kind of a routine, I guess. We went to town yesterday and got to stop in at the grand opening of one of my student’s family’s grocery stores. It was the most crowded store I have ever been in, but we managed to find some treasures, like Cheerios(!!!) and Skippy chunky peanut butter. I also got a free sample of ramen noodles…boiling water and splitting up the noodles and broth of a cup a noodles to serve hundreds of swarming customers didn’t seem like the most efficient free sample to take on, but at least they had the token person dressed up as some fuzzy stuffed mascot to show that this was a serious GRAND opening and not just some second-rate promotion. Yesterday was pretty rainy and gloomy, so we didn’t spend a whole lot of time in town, and we got a ride from a friend/neighbor up the mountain with our stuff, so we didn’t even have to do our weekly extreme physical challenge. Today a couple of kids came over, and Aaron figured out a way to make a shuffleboard on our porch/carport out of dirt and bottles that the kids found in the road. Pretty crafty, if you ask me, and the kids loved it. We also hiked out to the natural hot springs near our house, and even though they weren’t that hot because of all the rain we’ve had, they were a LOT warmer than the river, and the views along the way were some of the best around:

Big, mean-looking spider! We saw 3 just like this...hopefully you can see it in the picture

Here are the hot springs! The water is cloudy because of the limestone, I think.

It’s been a lot harder that I thought it would be to find opportunities to practice my Spanish, but I have at least a few conversations every day, either with the Honduran teachers at school, students (even though I’m only supposed to speak in English), or neighbors. We’ve been getting to know our immediate neighbors bit by bit. Up in the park, a woman named Dona Alejendrina lives with her two sons. She runs a little comedor (mini restaurant in her house), and she grows, harvests, and grinds her own coffee to sell. We went up there for lunch one day and her house is like a little botanical garden because her sons just find interesting plants in the park to transplant to pots and bottles, and they’ve got an amazing collection now. The comedor she has is just a table in her kitchen, and we just sat at it and talked with her while she made tortillas, eggs, beans, empanadas, and juice for us. It was a TON of food, but the tortillas were delicious…I never knew tortillas could really be anything special. I hope she can teach me to make them sometime. Her kitchen just has a brick stove on a counter where she puts wood and has a griddle to cook on. The ceiling and walls inside are completely black from the smoke, but she says this helps to waterproof the ceiling, anyway. We heard that she sold artesanias (crafts) at her house, so we asked her about it, and her son piped up and directed our attention to an axe handle that he had made. I guess the artesanias business isn’t taken so seriously…they just sell whatever they have on hand. The son also showed us some “puma teeth” that he found on the mountain somewhere, but we’re pretty sure they were toenails. Whatever they were, we were sure to ooh and ahh over them some because he was really proud of them.

A week or so after this nice meal in the blackened mountain garden kitchen, we had a run-in with the Dona’s sons’ evil twins. Okay, they were the same people, and they weren’t evil, but they were definitely not their sober, artesania-making selves. They wandered down the mountain one day and brought some (probably very strong, homemade) alcohol with them. They drank, it got dark, and they couldn’t make it back up the mountain to their house, so they were just hanging around on the road outside our house for awhile. They weren’t worrying us, but we did shut our door just in case. After awhile, I heard a knock at the door. I didn’t want to answer the door, but told Aaron that the bolos (drunk guys) were at the door. He opened it for them, and they asked for a glass. He gave them a bottle of water, thinking maybe they wanted to start sobering up. They turned it down and again asked for just a glass. He gave them a glass of water, they dumped out the water, and they poured some of their alcohol in the glass to offer to Aaron. He said no thanks, but it was nice of them to offer. They even shut the gate behind them—very polite bolos.

The rest of our neighbors live much closer to us, and they seem to all be related. There are maybe 10 houses in our little cluster up here, and we’re still trying to piece together names and how everyone is related to each other. We know most of the kids’ names now, and the dogs’ names, but for some reason, it seems more awkward to ask for the adults’ names. We do know that the patriarch, Don Luis, lives right near us, and one of my students lives with him. She is his granddaughter, but she calls him her father and her grandmother her mother because they have raised her. Her father died, and her mother is not in the picture either.

Paola, a student in my class, and her cousin Abby, two of our neighbors, visit our house pretty much every day.

Families seem very complicated here in some ways—it’s very common for kids to live with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and even more than in the States, I can never assume as a teacher that my students live with their parents. One out of seven people in Honduras live in the US, and a lot of these people have children that still live here in Honduras. Although the living situations and families here seem complex, in some ways, it’s pretty simple: you take care of your family. If someone in your family needs help, you help them. If you can take better care of your nephew than his parents can, then that’s what you do. If you can stay with your family when you start your own, then you do it. It doesn’t matter if someone is your brother or your third cousin…they are all family. Most people in the US don’t know who their third cousins are, much less live with them, but it’s different here.

I haven’t written anything about school, but on the whole, it’s been going well for both of us. We’re getting to know our students better, and adjusting to the nuances of third and fourth graders. I took my class to the river as a reward for good behavior this week, and they loved it. They collected water plants in bottles (we’ve been studying plants), and it was great to do something fun with them outside of the classroom. I did have a couple of unfortunate bodily function kinds of accidents in class this week, but luckily, they were both during times that I was with my middle school classes and another teacher was in charge of my third graders. We had to have a little class talk in Spanish about being understanding of people’s problems and not making them feel bad. There is a lot of tattling and drama in my class every day, but that is one advantage of being a foreigner…I can have selective moments of understanding what my kids are saying, and if I don’t want to know who copied the bonus problem off of Fatima or who borrowed Lorean’s pencil sharpener without asking, I can just say, “I’m sorry, can you say that in English?” and that’s all I hear about it. I am really starting to like my kids, though, and I love to see them succeed and make progress…they still have so much enthusiasm for school! They even get excited about having tests!

Maybe I’ll leave some school stories for Aaron to tell next time…this is already a long entry! Next weekend is a long weekend, so we should have some adventures to tell about then. The past couple weekends have been relaxing ones, but I think that next weekend we’re going to try to go to San Juan, a nearby town that has made itself known for coffee farms and demonstrations/lessons with artisans…it all sounds very informal, but since it’s not too far away, we can just show up and see if we can get a room somewhere and find some interesting things to do and see.

We’re missing everyone, but especially our Beverly/Boston folks tonight as we listen to the last Red Sox-Rays game of the series! We had pizza, apple pie, and baseball tonight…how much more American can you get?