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?