We get by with a little help (from family and strangers)

A big cloud trying to make it over the mountain


So, someone (aka me) should have written a blog entry about a month ago. There is a lot to catch up on. While its been winter in North, we’ve had some great weather here the last six weeks. January and especially February are supposed to be hot dry months but most of the days have been in the 70’s with a little shower every once in a while. Wherever we end up next year it will be hard getting used to the idea of experiencing winter again.

The last weeks of January were a little tough. We found out that the other three teachers from the United States at our school were going to be leaving. One of the teachers had to leave because her mother is sick and the other two teachers decided to leave because they didn’t like living and working here. They were all our friends, and it was really sad seeing them leave. It was an emotionally draining time, just thinking about them all leaving and wondering how many more classes we would have to be covering. It is a hard job and not always the easiest lifestyle, but is hard for us to imagine leaving the kids and the community. It was a stressful time but once the teachers left it turned out it wasn’t as bad as we thought. Although our schedules have changed we really haven’t had to take on too many more classes, since I think the school is scared that we will leave.

The first weekend of February we had a nice visit with a friend of ours from college. Amy and her cousin were spending a couple of weeks traveling through Central America and they were nice enough to make a detour and come visit us. We hadn’t seen Amy in 5 years and it was great catching up with her and hearing about her experience in the JET program, in Mongolia and all the other cool places she’s been. It was so unexpected to have this person we haven’t seen in five years show up at the bus station in Gracias, but it was a really nice break in routine for us.

In other news, I’ve started playing on the neighborhood soccer team. Luckily, I’m far from the best player and definitely not the worst, so it’s a good opportunity to get a little more exercise. We play a couple times a week on the field at school and then every once in a while, probably once a month, we have a real game against a team from another community. I thought that the soccer style would be a lot different here. The last time I really played competitive soccer was in high school, and even then the main strategy (not of the better teams) was to kick the ball as hard as possible down the field. When we’re just playing around here they guys show a lot of foot skills and touch but as soon as we got into the game it was the same old boot it as far as you can strategy. Here is a picture of one of the fields we play on taken by Dad. I don’t know if you can tell too well from the picture, but it is a steep grade with lots of rocks, more often a description for a road than a soccer pitch.


At school we’ve started having afterschool help classes twice a week. Melanie I and have been pushing for it for a long time (as well as a lot of parents) and while it is a good chance to give some students some extra attention it can be pretty exhausting. The kids seem to have more energy after 3:00 but I’m exhausted. It's also hard because while it is a smaller group than our class, it is still kids and I try to balance one on one time with group activities. The kids and the parents both see it as a desirable thing to have help class, so at least they aren’t griping about having to stay after. Both of us are really beginning to be able to notice progress in our classes too, so hopefully we can keep that ball rolling.

The biggest thing that has happened since the last blog entry was having my parents visit for a week. They flew from Raleigh to San Pedro, rented a car and drove the four hours to Gracias. They don’t speak any Spanish and they did a great job navigating the roads and potholes to get out here to the mountains, even with the clutch of the rental forcing them to drive in 4th gear for the last part of the trip. Dad did a quick fix on the car once they got to Gracias and we drove up to Guancascos where we had a nice dinner looking out over the town. After dinner we began our drive up the mountain to our house and quickly realized that the car was pretty unsuited for the road, scraping on rocks the entire way up. We finally made it up, gave them the thirty second house tour, and turned in for the night. The next day we headed to school and let them have a day to relax and explore around our house. They ended up doing quite a hefty hike up the mountain, getting to see the river and a little bit of wildlife. We just relaxed Thursday night and then Friday my Mom and Dad came to school with us. For our morning devotional Dad taught the kids a song and sign language to go with it and then Mom told a story I remember hearing a lot growing up about doing your chores. It was so nice having them at school, both so they could see it and to have the extra help. It was amazing how much more you can get done when there are three teachers in the room. They also were very helpful harvesting the radishes from the 4th grade garden. The students were foaming at the mouth to pull them out of the ground and having three people made things a lot calmer.
Mom keeping the washing of the radishes under control:


Juli with the biggest radish:


Dad overseeing the picking operation:



A happy gang

We’ve harvested about 150 radishes from the garden and the first day we picked them with my parents we made a radish salad that the kids are still talking about.
Here is Dani working on the salad:


And David and Claudia adding some finishing touches:


Friday after school I played a little soccer and then we headed down the mountain with our neighbor Mark to go to the hot springs. The hot springs here are nice, really big and deep with a couple different pools, but there are a couple of things that make the environment very Honduran. One of these is the music; you sit in the pools trying to relax and there is this thumping loud music playing, the equivalent of the music they used to play at roller skating rinks. The other nice touch that adds to the atmosphere are the armed guards. While it is a little strange having a couple of guys walking around with sawed off shotguns it does make me feel a little better about not having people rifle through our belongings. We had a nice soak in the hot springs and got into the car to head back up the mountain. By this time, it was about 10:30 and we were all looking forward to bed. We made it about a kilometer down the dirt road and then the tire went flat. After already having a little trouble making it down the mountain this just added to the annoyance and the stress level of everyone but we thought it would be a quick fix. We got the spare on, started off again and in about 100 yards it was flat. As you can guess, by this time we were all a little beyond the state of being annoyed with the car. I thought I would just call a friend in Gracias and see if they could come pick us up so we might get the tire fixed, but when I tried calling the phone went dead. So with this perfect storm of events we all realized we were going to be in for a long night. Mark and I walked back to the hot springs to see if we could find anyone who would give us a ride. Luckily there were still some people there that Mark had been talking to earlier and they agreed to give all five of us a ride. We got back to the car where everyone else was waiting and decided what to do, as it was now getting close to 11:30. The people who were giving us a ride were sooooo helpful; they offered to let us use their spare tire to get our car back to town. Then it turned out that the originial spare for our car was stuck, and it took a good fifteen minutes of hitting it with a basketball sized rock to get it off. Finally, we got the new spare on and drove back to Gracias with our new friends following us to help us look for a tire place that might be open at 11:30. We found one tire place on the highway but when we went over to try and rouse the owners there were five of the meanest dogs I’ve ever seen, ready to take a nice bite out of us. We gave up on getting the tire fixed that night and offered to bring their spare back to them a couple days later when we were passing through their town. It turns out the guy who’s spare it was happened to be driving to Mexico the next day so we had to give him back the spare that night. We decided to drive the car to Guancascos where it would be safe, leave it there for the night and then get it fixed the next morning. This still left the problem of getting home, and since we didn’t really have many options we all started the march up the mountain to our house a little after midnight. It was a long dark walk, but my parents did an amazing job and were really good about all the adventures we had that night. The two things that will stick in my mind from that night are the crappiness of the car and how amazingly kind and helpful the strangers were at midnight when they still had to drive an hour to get home.

We were supposed to spend most of the next day making tamales with our neighbors but after the late night we nixed that and slept a good while and then walked back down to Gracias. It was a nice walk down, introducing Mom and Dad to all the acquaintances we’ve made doing this walk every week. We made it to town and Melanie and I took the tire in a mototaxi to one of the tire places in town. The good thing about places like that is that even in a foreign country there is really only one reason you would show up at tire place with a tire in hand. It made our job easy. We just sat their while they fixed the tire. It cost $1.50 to patch the tire and we did have to buy another tire for the spare rim but that was $25 well spent for a little peace of mind.


A picture of the house and the car, the Chevy Headache

After getting the tire fixed I showed Mom and Dad around town, the market, square, church, and of course the popsicle lady. We got a little lunch and then headed across the countryside to La Campa, our favorite nearby town. It's usually utterly tranquil and serene, but this weekend was the town festival, one of the biggest in the region. The ride over there was still really pretty, but there was tons of traffic and we got stuck behind a truck full of metal poles that weren’t secured to the truck at all so we had to stay pretty far back for security purposes. The festival was a lot like fairs and festivals in other countries with a bigger concentration of used clothes and hair gel products. We wandered around looking at and sampling some of the food, buying a little pottery and unfortunately finding a foosball tent where Melanie beat me, an event I won’t be allowed to forget for a long time. Here is some unfortunate proof:


A portable version of the wood cookstoves (fogon) everyone has in their house here:


Sunday morning we packed up a little to get ready to head to Copan and then went to our neighbors house to make pupusas, kind of a stuffed fat tortilla.


Mom and Melanie getting the cheese ready for the pupusas


Pupusa sounds like baby indian but man do they taste good.

It was supposed to be a women only thing but dad and I peeked our heads in the kitchen and got permission to give it a go. While the women finished up, I brought down the banjo that Dad brought down and let our neighbor, the church piano player have a go at it. He was playing tunes in 2 minutes. There probably aren’t too many banjo players in Honduras and he might already have the title as best in the country over me. After the good lunch of pupusas we hit the road for Copan about 3 hours away. It was a pretty easy drive and we made to the cobblestone town and to the hostel Iguana Azul where we had stayed before. We walked all around getting some pizza, people watching, and just sitting on the patio at the hostel talking, a really nice evening. The next morning we grabbed some breakfast and walked over to the ruins where we had a nice walk around looking at the pyramids and sculptures from 1500 years ago.
Mom and dad in front of some ancient dressing rooms:


Here is Dad checking out the pyramids from above:


The ruins are really interesting and its also a kind of spellbindingly beautiful place that you just want to walk around slowly and take it in with giant trees and cool moss covered stones everywhere. We got some lunch before we headed back towards Gracias and made it as far as Santa Rosa before the car had another flat tire. Melanie and I were in the big grocery store there stocking up while Dad walked over to a tire place and got them to fill it up. It didn’t fix it, though, and as soon as he put it on it started going flat again so we had to drive over as quick as we could. The rim was bent on the tire making it so there was never a good seal and they couldn’t really fix it, so after an hour and a half we put the spare on and drove back. The drive back to Gracias was fine except for the fact that the headlights of the car and everyone we passed flashed us because they thought we had our brights on. Mom and Dad just relaxed the next day to recover from a little stomach bug we all had caught. They did a really good job with their Spanish and went up in the park to a little restaurant there to buy some coffee. When we got home from school, we walked over to the natural hot springs near our house and had a soak. It was a little weird because when we got there, there was already someone in the pool and I didn’t really know the correct etiquette so we just waited for him to get out. After soaking we walked back in the dark which was pretty tough. We made it back to house, had some soothing potato soup and helped load Mom and Dad up with stuff to take back with them. We called it a night and woke up early to say goodbye. It was so nice having them here, to help us out, to talk to, to show them around our world here. It's been really hard being so far away from our families and friends this year and having them here made it not seem so far away at all. We're having a great time but we can't wait to see everybody this summer or even sooner if you happen to be heading down this way.