Sunday, October 19, 2008

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 4th 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 3rd 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?

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Our House (The Blue House to everyone in the neighborhood)


When we first saw our house I was kind of turned off to the fact that it had fencing and gates and everything. We want to be friendly neighbors and it always seems like fencing gets in the way of that. Since we’ve been here though I’ve realized how important it is. We still talk with our neighbors and everything when they come by, but it provides invaluable defense against the other residents of our neighborhood, namely cows and horses and the dogs that are healthy enough to not be able to squeeze through the gate. One of the really skinny dogs comes every night around eight to raid our compost pile. He’s shameless about it and it doesn’t really matter to me if the worms eat it or he does, and I’m hoping that eventually he will be too wide to fit through the gate (its been sounding lately like it’s a little harder for him to fit through).

Our porch

Definitely one of the best features of our house. It is meant to be a carport but with us not having a car it gives us lots of room for our hammock and outdoor dining and rainy day clothesline. We spend a lot of time out here after school decompressing, and it’s a great place to be at night with the river rumbling beside us, and the stars are so brilliant and distinct when the sky is actually clear at night. They would be even brighter if there wasn’t a street light next to our house which seems as out of place here as a full day of sun or rain. I made a chandelier out of some Coke bottles and wood that I found in our yard. Since we are so cut off from town and any materials besides what happens to be right here, we have to be more resourceful. I think that has been one of the biggest changes in mindset that we’ve experienced so far, going from oh we need this I’ll go get it at the store, to oh we need this, how can we meet that need with what we have. We find ourselves throwing away between 1-2 pounds of trash every week and saving anything that could possibly be useful for potting plants, fixing leaks, anything.
The hammock is also major plus of our house. When some of the administrators from the school were visiting last month Melanie happened to mention that she was going to get a hammock for my birthday they just volunteered that they would make the trek to the prison for us to buy one. It must be a pretty nice one because our neighbors have advised us to take it inside whenever we go away for the weekend, in case someone else might take a liking to it.

Living Room
This is probably where we spend most of our time inside. We eat some meals at the table, which has a nice view out the window of the town and valley below and it is the location of the only internet connection in our village. We have one sort of lounging chair that had a major positive makeover when we threw a sarong on top of it, our projector wall (of course), and some of the artwork of the artist from the school. We’re trying to stem the spread of dirt a little bit so Melanie came up with the idea of using some cardboard boxes sort of as a shoe rack. The wooden window covers actually make the room look a lot nicer, when they’re closed it kind of feels like a depressing monastery. The wooden ceiling made it really easy to hang the instruments, although it is possible to nail things into the adobe. Most houses only have clay ceiling tiles which tend to be an open door for lots of bugs and rain. One step up from that is having a plastic liner under the tiles. We’re even one step above that, with tiles, liner and wooden ceiling.

Bathroom

Our bathroom is pretty posh (especially for Honduras) but I think I even like it better than the bathroom we had in our apartment in Boston. Yes, the sink is tiny and there is a trash can full of used toilet paper (the plumbing here can’t handle TP), but to be honest it doesn’t smell that bad and that doesn’t matter because our bathroom has HOT WATER!!!! Before we came to Honduras I was really dreading cold showers. I knew I would probably get used to them but I spent the months before we came mentally preparing myself for the shock of icy water and going back to a house without heat.

This little guy, Electro-duche, makes everyday so much easier. Although we do have to deal with the power being out quite often having a cold shower every couple of weeks is much better than every night. It’s a pretty cool little device as well. It’s electric on demand hot water, so rather than having to run plumbing for hot water throughout the entire house you just put this little puppy on the end of the pipe and voila, hot water. It is a little scary at first though; it has 5500 watts pumping through it and it sounds like you’re standing 6 inches under a huge buzzing power line. I have no idea what the little udder thing is for though.

Kitchen

Oh, what to say about our kitchen. Although we don’t have all the ingredients we’re used to here, we eat really well and our food is really healthy. We don’t really eat meat because it is expensive and a little sketchy to have unrefrigerated for the hour and a half walk up the mountain so our diet consists of lots of veggies, fruit, rice, beans, eggs, and homemade bread. We spend a lot of time cooking everyday because we have that time, it’s relaxing, and it takes a long time to cook things with our appliances. Thankfully we do have an oven, but it is more like a gas powered easy bake oven. The temperature settings on the oven are little flame, medium flame, and big flame and even big flame is probably only 325 degrees.
Here is a little example of what that little baby can do though:

We have a refrigerator/freezer, toaster, and French press coffee maker and although we’re used to cooking with lots of gadgets and everything, we manage quite well with what we have at hand. For example, we don’t have a griddle or any really good skillets, so to make pancakes and grilled cheese we use a cookie sheet on the eye of the stove. The biggest challenge of cooking is buying the food and getting it to our house. We can’t just go to the grocery store and get everything we need. When we go into town on Saturday to buy our supplies, we go to the market, see what everyone has and then start buying from all the different stalls. By the time we have everything we need, we’ve probably visited 15-20 stalls and then we still have to buy the non-perishables. Each little grocery store in town has something a little different so we end up going to 4-5 different grocery stores to get what we need. My brother pointed out to me that it’s like a real life scavenger hunt, and that’s a really good way of looking at it. So after we buy all our food (probably 60-80 pounds a week) we have to make it up the mountain either on our bikes or walking. Whenever we’re not in the process of walking or riding up the mountain it doesn’t seem that bad of an idea, but when we are actually in the process it is hell, lots of swearing as we get cut off by trucks and the load just gets heavier and heavier the further up we go. But back to the kitchen, we’re very lucky to have such a great fruit and vegetable selection. Bananas are 2 cents each, pineapples are 50 cents, so we have a lot of smoothies and banana sandwiches. Here is a picture of one week’s worth of fruit;

It’s hard to believe it is only for two people and even harder to believe it only cost $3.

Our bedroom

The bedroom is really big for us and kind of empty, but it’s a really nice room. At night we have the street light in the window which is a nice night light for getting up to go to the bathroom, and we get a lot of light in the morning which makes it a lot easier to wake up. It gets nice and chilly at night and up until a few days ago we had to use our sleeping bags as a blanket. Normally, this wouldn’t be that bad, but they are mummy shaped and fit the bed like a pair of lungs and the nylon made them slide off every night. Now though we have an amazingly soft microfleece blanket (thanks to a great birthday present that made it here in a record 3.5 weeks!) that makes getting out of bed that much harder. You can see some of the other paintings that the artist did to fill the strange cubby in our room.

Our garden

It doesn’t look like much now but we just got the seeds in yesterday and we’re hoping that in a couple of months it will be overflowing, thus eliminating some of the weight from our weekend trips. We’re so happy to have the seeds and both of us are talking about plants in science class so we’re going to try to grow some at school as well. The soil here seems really good for pretty much anything and many plants can’t grow year round so as long as we don’t run into any conflict with the rainy and dry season we should be able to shake our knack of killing plants.

The spare room

This tends to just be a clothes storage and yoga room, but it is nice to have this room for putting a lot of our stuff and Melanie came up with a very creative way of making a closet: a window, a door, and a metal rack.

Our laundry machine
Ahh yes, definitely not my favorite part of our new lifestyle, but I have to admit handwashing clothes isn’t as bad as I thought. It’s a good time to think about what’s going on, like how you should wear fewer clothes, and it gets your hands really really clean. We usually spend a good part of Saturday morning doing wash and then hanging it up and as long as it doesn’t rain, which it does pretty much everyday, then our clothes are dry in the afternoon when we get back from town.

Part I

The day before we actually “wash” the clothes we put them all in this big bucket with water and soap and let them soak overnight. Then we drag the tub outside where the fun really begins.

Part II
This is called the pila, and this is where we spend our Saturday mornings. Melanie and I have slightly different techniques but basically you scrub the clothes on the textured cement with a baton shaped cake of soap and then you rinse and rinse and rinse and rinse using the hose and really soft water we have. Each article of clothing takes 2-5 minutes, so when you add up a week’s worth of laundry it takes a while.
When we first moved into the house it was sooo empty. It really looked a lot like a monastery with the bare white walls and closed wooden shutters. Even in just six weeks it feels like home. We feel really lucky and blessed to live where we do, the house fits us really nicely and the setting is different and beautiful every time you look.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

My feet is my only carriage...



This is just a shot behind the school on our way out the gate and home for the day. Not a bad view, huh? You can even see the distant waterfall if you look closely.



Here's a look across the "street" from the school...a little comedor (kind of a very relaxed version of a restaurant) and one of the neighborhood dogs. The dogs have the school schedule internalized better than the kids. As soon as the bell rings, I can see them sneaking up to the school to pick scraps out of the classroom garbage cans. They feast on lunch spills and offerings in the outdoor cafeteria, and they usually wander the courtyard at snacktime, too. I honestly don't know how they're as skinny as they are.

So, another week’s gone by. Each week seems to go just a little smoother, but I think most of that is just us getting used to craziness at school. I was talking to my dad just a few minutes ago, and he made a good point that most ELL kids in the States learn English not so much from their teacher in the classroom, but from interacting with their English-speaking peers. This is one of the many issues with our school, but I think it’s a big one…the kids haven’t learned much English after several years of being in a “bilingual” school because all of them speak Spanish to each other, and most try to speak Spanish to their teachers as well. They don’t practice English, and have no motivation to learn English. I can’t blame them, either. Who would want to learn a difficult language that no one you know besides your teacher speaks?

The kids got their textbooks this week, which they were wildly excited about (not being sarcastic). Some of them were kissing them or smelling them (a book that isn’t moldy is a rarity here), and they didn’t want to write their names inside because to them that was mistreating the books. Some of them are helpful to have from a teaching perspective, like the Math books. It’s great to not have to get so many photocopies made for practice sheets. Some of the books, though, like Reading, Science, and Language, are way too advanced for my kids at this point, so it’s a little sad to have to disappoint them by not using the books during those subjects. Maybe using the books some days could be like a little reward for them, even if they have no clue what’s on the pages besides pictures of plants and animals.

We had a long staff meeting after school on Friday. It’s interesting to note that staff meetings everywhere are pretty much a drag. They’re doubly so when you have to listen to each point made in both English and Spanish. During the meeting, they gave us some very generic/obvious tips (be patient with the kids; don’t let them hang on the bars of the windows; try to use fewer, simpler words to explain directions), complaints were expressed (the cafeteria sells cookies when the kids aren’t allowed to eat sweets—the response to this one was that they were healthier cookies than some varieties you can buy; the kids need to be walked to the bus after school and not run madly through the courtyard), and some teachers were texting on their phones throughout the whole meeting. Just like meetings everywhere…except there was a serious lack of snacks, which was a sadly missed opportunity for a nice morale booster.

This weekend was pretty average, too, but relaxing. We had a couple teachers over for dinner on Friday night, then Saturday morning we walked the 4.5 miles into town, did our many-stop shopping around town, got some bean soup and rollitos for lunch, and headed back up the mountain with our loaded bags, stopping at Jesus’s pulperia (just a little “convenience” store between our house and town) for some drinks and to give him a little help setting up his new computer. It’s always an exhausting trip, and we’re so happy when we get home to our quiet house.



This one we took on our way back up the mountain after going to town. We stopped for a little break on the road, and were passed by a moto taxi carrying a mattress! These are little miracle machines! Clown cars have nothing on them! It's a little blurry, but you get the idea.



This is a little further up, between school and our house. The walk home is a lot harder some days than others, depending how much the day has taken out of us, but the views are great, and the walk definitely beats a commute through traffic!

Today we’re supposed to get together with Frony (the former owner of the school) and her 2 kids that go to our school. We made plans yesterday to make pizza with them, but plans here are much different than making plans at home. If someone tells you that they’ll come by your house in the afternoon, they may come by in the afternoon, or they may stop by in the morning, at night, or not at all…changing the plans without letting you know isn’t considered rude…we’re just learning to be flexible and see what happens.

So, I wrote the previous paragraphs on Sunday and it's now Wednesday...I had wanted to post a video tour of the house, but it just won't upload...maybe next week we can do a photo tour instead. Just as a follow up to the pizza night, we did end up getting together and making pizza down at her house with her, the 2 kids, and 3 of her friends that live in Gracias. Everyone was amazed at the pizza dough and the whole process! It was kind of like an interactive cooking show for a little while. We made chocolate chip cookies, too, and they thought they were really rich, but I'd say they were still a big hit. As cookie making goes, I think about as much raw dough was eaten as cookies were. Nobody had ever had chocolate chips before! Apparently, not everyone seeks them out like rare treasures around here--just us foreigners. It was a nice night, though, and a good chance to practice some Spanish with some patient and interesting people.

We're halfway through the week now, and I hope I don't jinx the last two days (because Thurs and Fri are by far the hardest with these crazy kids!), but it's going pretty smoothly. Aaron can write more about it and our 3 day weekend coming up next time!