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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.