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!