Four Eyes on the Mountain

Up and over the mountain

2009-06-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Looking out from the castle in Gracias over the rest of Lempira

Looking from the castle out over the town

From the castle up towards the Celaque cordillera

A really beautiful farm on our walk up the mountain

So we now have just a couple of weeks until we leave Honduras. Already a lot of the mixed feelings that we’ve expected have started flowing in. We’re both really excited about next year, knowing where we’ll be and that we both have great opportunities awaiting us. At the same time it is hard to imagine leaving our life here. We have so many great things that are a big part of us and it is going to be really hard to just cut all of the strings that connect us to the people here and this beautiful place. Our neighbors have watched out for us so much this year, dropping whatever they are doing and helping us whenever we have the smallest problem.

For the last couple of months one of the communities near Gracias has been digging trenches for supplying water and are building a little dam in the river near our house to catch the water. They bring up lots of loads of gravel and stuff in these big trucks that can barely turn around. One day we were walking home from school and just as we were getting to our house we saw one of the big trucks coming down. We breathed a sigh of relief, glad that it was gone for the day but once we got right to our house we realized that it had ripped the power line from our house. I think this is a good opportunity to use the word flabbergasted and that we were. We just had no idea where to begin solving the problem. I like trying to fix things but I’m pretty scared of messing with anything electrical. We didn’t know who was driving the truck, who they worked for or anything. We don’t know any electricians, there isn’t really a power company so we thought we might be out of power for an extended time. We were just standing outside our house looking dumbfounded. Our neighbor who works on the water system came walking down the mountain as we were standing in the middle of the road and after looking at our faces asked what was up. We told him our plight and he was like, oh I have a friend who is an electrician and I’ll call him and get him to come up. With Honduran standard time measurement being on the slow side of things and everything we kind of just assumed that he might stop by in the next week some time and went inside getting all of our candles ready for the night. 15 minutes later a guy comes up to our house in a motortaxi and we thought he was picking up some tourists but nope it was the electrician friend. He and three of our neighbors proceeded to take apart the power line and the meter that used to be attached to our house and spent an hour getting everything reattached. We were worried that it was going to cost a lot of money and we might have to try going through the process of recouping it. So when we asked the electrician how much we could pay him and he said 100 lempiras ($5), we were amazed again at how helpful everyone is here. So far our experience here has been extremely positive as far as interactions go with everyone. Even more so than in the states my first reaction is to trust people and that makes every day that much less stressful and communications more open even with the language barrier.

Some of our kids making recycled castles for Earth Day

Dani's birthday in my class

Leaving the kids is going to be so hard but the actual job we have here will not be that hard to leave. We work with a lot of really great people but this week we were reminded strongly of how little we entirely understand this culture especially at school. The last couple of months there has been construction on a new basketball court at school. They just finished it this week and it looks awesome!!

The first rule was that the kids can’t play on it for another week. The reason for this is that there was going to be an official dedication ceremony with some of the donors who gave money for the project and I guess they don’t want the court to be dirty. For the dedication ceremony two high school teams were bussed in from the other side of the country to play while the parents watched. The teachers played both the teams and surprisingly we won. It was sad that the younger kids weren’t allowed to come and watch the ceremony or the game. The 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders came but none of the younger kids could come. The principle told my class they couldn't come because they would be noisy and annoying. I was sad to hear the principal say that to my students and really sad that they didn't get to go to the ceremony for the basketball court, something that they are so excited about. There was another weird sports related event at school too. During one of Melanie’s classes the principal interrupted her class to ask her if she would play in the girls soccer game this weekend. The older girls at the school have been practicing a lot the last couple of months and have gotten pretty good but apparently this weekend they are playing a really good team and there is some rule loophole where people up to age 28 can play on the team. There are a lot of girls on the team already who don’t get to play much and it seems really strange to ask one of the teachers who isn’t part of the team to play and take playing time from the people who the team is meant for.

A few weeks ago we had a really nice time visiting the country estate/ farm of the founder of our organization. We caught a ride to La Union and had a tour of the school and some of the development things the organization is doing there. They really have made a big difference in that community and are starting to make big changes in the challenges that poor people in rural areas face. The only awkward part was when they wanted to show us the houses of a couple of the scholarship students at the school. We understand how poor people are here and it was a little strange going to people’s houses just to see how they live in poverty.

The leaders of Vida Abundante are such thoughtful and genuinely nice people and they have made a positive impact in Honduras. At the farm Eunice, the school superintendent, cooked us three or four 4 star meals and her dad, the pastor and leader of the whole organization, took us for walks around his property showing us what La Union is like.

Coffee plants in bloom in La Union

Some of the new classrooms they're building at school. The bricks are made from the dirt they used to level the land so the building cost is close to zero.

We’ve been so lucky this year to have so many friends come visit us. In the beginning of May our friends Klaus and Mimi came and visited us and they did an amazing job navigating the travel challenges the big H can pack. Mimi is in vet school at NC State and was doing a veterinary mission in Central Honduras and they stopped by Gracias before heading over there. All of our other visitors had rented a car or spoke some Spanish. They made it all the way from San Pedro (a cab ride and two buses) to Gracias speaking no Spanish. We met them in Santa Rosa and got to share the bus ride back to Gracias with some good 80’s tunes cranking on the stereo. They came in on Wednesday and after a good dinner at Guancascos we had a fully loaded down moto-taxi ride up the continually worsening road to our house. The tuktuks are only supposed to have a driver and two passengers but we were barely able to squeeze the four of us, the bags they brought, and our shopping for the week. After this and our other experiences I’m beginning to think Moto-taxi Diaries would be a great sequel to the motorcycle version. On Thursday they went up to the park and had a good meal and fun communicating with Dona Alejandrina. They did a really good job piecing together Spanish phrases and came back with some bags of her awesome coffee. Thursday evening we just relaxed around the house and made some pizza and then Friday they came to school with us. It is always so great having extra hands in the classroom and they were a really big help in my math class and with reading groups. Friday after school we hit up the hot springs with our neighbor Mauricio and waited forever for some tacos to tie us over until dinner. There aren’t many souvenirs in Gracias but Klaus found some gems at the hot springs, some polo shirts with pictures of the pools. The other funny part of their visit came on Saturday morning when we were taking them to their bus to get to Siguatepeque. We had heard that there was a 5:30 direct bus to La Esperanza which would save a bus transfer and got down there 15 minutes early and started looking for it. We found the type of bus that usually makes the trip and asked them if it was the direct bus. They said no, and so we asked when the direct bus was coming. The driver then sort of laughed and said there aren’t any direct buses and so we got their bags up on top of the bus. Just as about we were about to leave another bus pulled up that was the direct bus. The two drivers were apparently good friends and they probably chatted everyday at the same time. I guess the first driver was just trying to get the Lempiras. We were glad that there actually was a direct bus and got their bags on the right bus and said goodbye. It sounds like their vet trip was successful too. I think they dewormed something like 4,000 animals and Klaus went around to public schools doing a presentation on public health. Talking to Klaus afterwards I feel like he made a pretty astute observation about Honduras. He was talking about how isolated most of the country is. Almost the entire country is rural but more importantly 90% of it is really isolated. This isolation comes from the fact that infrastructure and basic services don’t make it very far at all outside of towns and cities. There are so few paved roads, water systems, and medical and educational services so that even if you live ten miles away from a town or city it might as well be 100 miles away.

The kindergarteners practicing their dance for gradutation.

A picture of a strange sky phenomenon we've had a couple of times called a Sun Dog. It's a big cloudy circle around the sun with a rainbow on the edge that looks like it is a spaceship coming to land.

Bug Update

Whenever you ask someone when some weather event such as seasons you get a vague unique answer from everyone you ask. The one thing that is more certain than the seasons is the selection of bugs and insects that visit us. It seems like we have become premium members of the Bug-of-the-Month Club. When we first arrived our main battles were against 2 or 3 different varieties of ants. Throughout the year they’ve progressed, sort of like video game levels, and I’m hoping we don’t have to face the boss insect soon. Back in May the cicadas came out, really loud and really made the summer here seem authentic. The dry whistling of cicadas is probably the sound that is most tied to summer in my mind. The interesting part was everyone knew that the cicadas would be here for three weeks. Apparently the cicadas are brought to life by the first torrential downpour that breaks the dry season and then killed 3 weeks later by the next torrential rain. The late May bug was quite a doozy, a ¾ inch flying ant that all woke up out of the ground one rainy night and swarmed the light emanating from our house. All the kids at school had been talking about them and how they like to fly in your ears and burrow so for a couple of days the kids were walking around with paper stuffed in their ears to protect them from the bugs. When we saw them outside our windows we thought, “Great. Well at least we have screens on our windows.” We thought we were all good. The next day we were cleaning up the kitchen and we noticed all these half-inch worm type things crawling around. We assumed at first that they’d gotten into our food and it took about ten minutes to figure out these were the same flying ants from the night before that had shed their wings and after looking found there more than 100 around our house. They were creepy and crawly and easy to kill but there was an added challenge in that our power was out so we had to add headlamps to the flipflops we were using as weapons, bent over walking around the house squashing the bugs. Our latest bugs are no-see-ums that come at night and bite you as you try to sleep. I usually have zero problem sleeping but getting bitten and then wondering about when you are going to be bitten next makes falling asleep a little tougher. The solution we have for getting rid of them is lighting one of those bug coils, but then our bedroom is a little lucky. We’ll have to wait and see what the bugs have in store for us these last couple weeks.

Our classes have been doing well though. We've both been trying to do some fun educational things to tie up the year. Melanie's class has been doing a morning news show with weather and announcements and a couple of her kids are desperate about being able to use their video cameras (aka arms with a hand "turning" the reel) to tape it. In my class we just finished up a Boxcar Children movie. We had a competition to see who could write the best Boxcar Children story and then we made it into a screenplay. There was a lot of drama about who got what part but it turned out pretty good.

As you can tell from the picture a couple of the scenes were darker than the original books.

We hiked up another trail on the mountain a while ago. The trail went along the ridge for a long time and on one side the mountain was completely scorched from the forest fire, but on the other side it was the dense green we are used to.

Melanie's class after winning the mass soccer game

So two more weeks and we’re on a plane back to the states for a full and crazy summer. We’re going to have tons packed into these last couple of weeks so I’m sure there will be one or two more blogs. We can’t wait to see everybody soon!

Must Be (Semana) Santa

2009-04-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Finally! Semana Santa is here! That’s Holy Week in Spanish, and it’s a really big deal down here. We have the first days off (besides the ones we’ve taken to spend with our visitors) since Christmas, and the restlessness and heightened daily drama with our kids were a sure sign that everyone needed a break. After our Landmark friends left, we had just a few days until my parents came in the following Sunday. In those days in between, we walked into town twice for faculty-student soccer games after school. The first one was for the boys’ team, so only male faculty played on the staff team. The kids may have been faster, but the teachers won pretty easily, and Aaron scored two of their goals. Not surprising, if you’ve seen him play soccer or at least seen how he pretty much always wins at everything. (You’d think could get annoying, but it just makes it all the more satisfying if you DO beat him!) Anyway, this is a little more of a surprise: I also scored two goals in the girls v. female faculty game a couple days later! We practiced once, and it was a lot of fun, but our odds didn’t look so good since the people who actually had soccer skills were pretty out-of-shape, and the people who could run had no soccer skills or experience! It all worked out, though, because it was just on a small cement field, 5 on 5, and it turned out that the girls still need a lot of practice. And we were a lot bigger than them, and they were in 6^th-8^th grade. So, maybe not the biggest accomplishment around, but it was really fun and I had never felt like a key player in a game before! Guess I just have to play at the middle school/middle-aged level more often!

My parents came in on Sunday evening, and we took them to Guancascos for dinner since it’s close and it’s got the best view of Gracias. We went home up the bumpy dirt road, and their car had no problems since we learned from Aaron’s parents’ experience and had them rent a pickup truck. My mom handled the truck well on the Honduran roads, and didn’t hit any horses or cows or fruitstands. They unpacked all sorts of goodies from Trader Joes and things for our kids, and I think we must have the most well-stocked kitchen in Honduras at this point…hopefully it’ll last through June! We gave the tutorial on the electro-shower and the other nuances of our house, and then they were all settled.

The next morning, we went to school, and my parents lounged around the hammock and carport/porch outside awhile and then walked around and went up into the park to Dona Alejendrina’s comedor for lunch. Neither of them speak any Spanish, but my mom was proud of the little things she was able to communicate, like “casa pollo” = chicken house, and lots of show-and-tell with pictures of the dogs on her camera, pictures of our wedding, etc. Dona Alejendrina loves visitors, so I’m sure she enjoyed having my parents there. She gave them a little coffee demo, stuffed them with tortillas and eggs, and my parents made it home with a couple pounds of newly-acquired coffee and some full bellies just in time to meet us coming home from school. My mom and I walked over to the little hot springs before dinner, and I was impressed how fast she made it up the longer hills on the way home, especially considering she probably walked about 10 miles that day. The dry season doesn’t seem to affect the level of the water in the hot springs, I guess because it just comes directly out of the ground. The river has gotten really low, though, and is just a trickle compared to what it was during the rainy season. Only a month or month and a half until we can expect to say goodbye to all the dust that seems to just saturate the air and blow everywhere in the wind.

The next day, my parents went to La Campa, but didn’t find too much there except the pottery museum and a lot of places closed because of a town meeting going on. On the way there, though, they stopped some people on the road to confirm that they were headed in the right direction. Here, though, when you yell out a destination as a question, people assume that you are offering them a ride to that place. So, when my parents yelled, "La Campa?" out the window, a bunch of people yelled back, "Si!" and climbed into the back of the truck. So, my parents unintentionally picked up some hitchhikers, and got the full Honduran experience. They helped us with our after school classes that day, too, which was a welcome change of pace for both the kids and us. Whenever there are visitors at school helping, the kids who get stuck in my group always kind of groan because they want the new and exciting people. Oh well…luckily, I don’t take it personally! Later that night, we made pizza at the neighbor’s house, since one has been asking for me to teach her. Aaron made his famous banana pudding, and I made some guacamole, too. The pizza seemed to be a hit, and it was nice for my parents to spend a little time getting to know our neighbors, even if they couldn’t talk too much. We actually went over there again the next night so that my mom and I could paint “Comedor Melgar”—the name of their new restaurant—on their wall outside. Now the tourists that walk by on their way up the mountain will know that they can stop there for food. It got dark a little faster than we had anticipated, but with the help of some headlamps and flashlights, we finished the job and the neighbors fed us some fried chicken, beans, and tortillas. We watched a little of the Honduras-Mexico soccer game on TV afterward, and I’m pretty sure that the wiry little neighbor man we watched with, Luis, only sits down to watch soccer and to eat. He had gone up to the top of the mountain and back with a tourist hiker in just 9 hours the day before…and he’s in his 60s at least.

At school, my mom was immediately a big hit with the kids with her hula hoop skills and the beautiful mural that she made for them to fill in with bits of colored paper.

The mural, which is two 9 ft panels, one for each of our classes:

When it’s done, I’ll post pictures…it’s going to look great, though, and it’s huge! And it’s perfect for the kids to work on when they finish something early and have a few minutes to kill. My dad was a hit, too, and was first pick for reading groups in my class, even though he was dubbed “Mr. Lazy” when he was resting his head on the ledge outside the classroom and one kid said “he don’t want to do nothing!” It was nice showing my parents the school, but it was also really nice to leave after school Thursday with them and know that we had a long break ahead!

Aaron got us to Copan in just 2 hours driving true Honduran-style, passing trucks and busses and bikes and all sorts of contraptions that they wouldn’t allow on the highway in the States. Our hotel had a beautiful view of the mountains, and included breakfast the next morning, which I was really excited about. We did get a little bad news when we arrived, though. The main ruins site was going to be closed the next day due to protest from some of the indigenous people. I’m not sure exactly why they were protesting, but I’m guessing that they don’t see a lot of the money that the government makes off of their heritage. Even though we didn’t go to the main site, we saw some lesser-known ruins of the residential, middle-class part of the Mayan city at Copan, and a knowledgeable guy jumped right on us and became our guide as soon as we pulled up to park there.

Unfortunately, this is the only picture I took at the ruins or with my parents because my mom has them all on her camera, but they were here!

We spent the morning there and the afternoons at the bird park with the parrots and macaws and such, ate lunch, took a dip in the river there, and then headed back to town for souvenirs and such good smoothies—like liquid fruit without anything else added. We had a little dinner at a place with a courtyard, and we were the only people being served. After dinner we walked around the plaza, people-watched and tried not to let the breathy, loud flute music and desperate CD sales get to us. Then it was back to the hotel, and my parents left early the next morning. It was so good to have them here, and my mom recently emailed me to say that she’s going to try to do volunteer adult ESL literacy tutoring a couple of times a week. For my dad, being at school here was not a huge change from being at school all day back home (he’s a middle school principal), but for my mom, going to school here and helping us with reading groups made an impact on her and she’s realized that helping people learn to read is something she’d like to do. She’s a natural teacher and so good at communicating with an enjoying all kinds of people, so I hope it works out for her.

Since we were staying at this comfortable hotel with a free, huge, scrumptious breakfast (and we found out it was waffle morning, even), we opted for a noon shuttle to Guatemala rather than the early one. We had a relaxed morning full of food and reading and lazily watching the hotel cat that reminded us of our Hela back home, and then we packed up and met our shuttle, a minibus/van that was not surprisingly packed full of other tourists. Our plan was to get off at Guatemala City around 4 and then catch a bus to Xela, our first Guatemalan destination. Well, many unnecessary stops later, including van changes (why not just change the drivers?), 20-30 minute bathroom breaks, food and drink stops, and traffic jams, we finally reached Guatemala City around 7, and after much debate and frustration between the two of us, we both agreed to just go on to Antigua and find a place to spend the night there instead of catching a 5 or 6 hour ride to Xela. We thought it might be hard to find a place to stay in Antigua since it’s notoriously booked up and crowded all through Semana Santa, but as soon as we walked near the park with our backpacks, we just followed the first guy who yelled, “hotel??” at us. He took us to a pupuseria (place where they make stuffed tortillas), and a lady took us to a back room with a bed, set us up with a TV for Aaron to watch basketball, and gave us the key to the room. Not the most luxurious or spacious place (more like a large closet with a bathroom attached, and no windows), but hey, it was cheap, and it was just one night. We found a place to eat some delicious and artfully served soup (it had been awhile since we had been somewhere where presentation mattered), and strangely enough, mojitos were the cheapest drink on the menu—cheaper than water or coke or tea or anything else, so we had a little happy hour.

We got up early on Monday so that we could get to Xela with enough time to explore the city a little bit in the afternoon. At the bus station in Antigua, we bought the most delicious sandwiches on fresh crusty bread, with beans and egg, lettuce, avocado, and Aaron’s had chicken. Yum. We needed our energy, too, because we had to stand for a good hour or so in the bus aisle since there weren’t enough seats. The bus attendant brought Aaron a bucket to sit down on, eventually, which was nice of him, and on top of that, he was gracious enough to give up his cushion taped to the floor at the front of the bus for me. It was actually probably the nicest place I’ve sat on a bus here, because the windows up front are so big that it’s like touring the countryside in a big bumpy bubble with nothing blocking the view, nobody screaming into their cell phone, and out of earshot of the people getting on the bus to sell things or preach about Jesus, the evils of saturated fat, or missing limbs.

That was a fast bus ride, and it dropped us off on the highway outside of Xela in about half the time we were expecting—you just never know. I wish I could have taken a picture of our taxi without being completely rude; it really looked like it had been to the junkyard and back again at least a few times, and the driver had to hold two wires together to start it. Xela was the first place we’ve ever tried “couch surfing,” but it worked out really well. If you don’t know what that is, it’s an online network of people that agree to host out-of-town visitors. It’s kind of a social networking thing, where you can just say you will meet someone for coffee, show them around, let them stay with you, etc. You contact the people you want to stay with beforehand, and then they respond and let you know if they can host you. We put our house up on the site, and we’ve gotten a few requests, but they’ve all been for times that we’re gone or we already have visitors. We’ll see if anything works out before we leave, but I think it’d be fun just to meet some different people while we’re here and have plenty of free time to spend. Anyway, I’m sure it could have its awkward situations, but it’s free, it’s easy, and you can get a feel for the people on the website just through communication and their profile and seeing what others have said about them, so I’d recommend it if you’re looking for cheap travel.

So the place that the taxi brought us to was this guy’s house on the edge of the city. His name is Juan, and he’s young (I’d say 20-22), but he owns a café and a language school, so he keeps busy and he’s really used to foreigners. He drove us downtown, and we walked around a food festival and took advantage of free samples, got some falafal sandwiches, some cold chocolate drinks, and kind of drooled over some of the chocolate blocks for sale, but didn’t buy any because they were too expensive. I only say this because it is important later. We walked around the plaza, scoped out the colorful markets, the church, and the people making bouquets out of palms or grasses and all sorts of beautiful flowers.

These Easter-bouquet ladies were everywhere arranging flowers to sell:

There were people everywhere, but the women in their traditional dress just made the whole scene alive. Everywhere we went in Guatemala, with the exception of Antigua, the majority of women still wear traditional clothes—a long patterned skirt, a flowered embroidered blouse, ribbons in their hair, and all of it different colors and slightly unique from the others. The fabric was for sale in all the markets, but it was pretty expensive, so I guess that most women and girls just have one or two sets of clothes. Not many of the men had traditional dress, but in some other areas we passed through, they had loose pants made of the same kind of fabric the women’s skirts were made of, a decorated linen or cotton shirt, and a wrap going around their waists.

Here's some older girls in traditional skirts watching bumper-cars...interesting contrast, I think:

We walked around Xela a long time, took our time getting back to Juan’s house, and then went out again to find dinner. Aaron gave into a Wendy’s burger, and I had a salad made with actual non-iceberg lettuce and apples. Neither was very Guatemalan, but it was so good to have different options outside of our normal food in Honduras. We thought we were going to meet up with Juan and his girlfriend later, but it turned out they changed plans and wouldn’t be home until much later (the down side of couch surfing, if the host doesn’t give you a key), so we walked around a bit more and then couldn’t resist another dinner at an Indian restaurant. We tried to keep our second dinner small, but small by our standards when it comes to Indian food is still pretty hefty portions, so we were stuffed. We waited around in the plaza after dinner, then grabbed a taxi back to Juan’s house (thankfully, not the same taxi we caught before).

Xela looks really colonial, especially around the plaza. It felt more like Europe than Latin America at times:

The next day, we went on a mission to rent bikes and ride out to a nearby town. After shopping around, we found a great bookstore that rented well-cared-for bikes and even had a good map to use to get to where we wanted to go. This was fortunate, because without the map showing the back dirt roads, we would have had to take the highway. The ride was really tough in some spots because with the lack of rain, the dust was about 6 inches deep in a few places, but we made it to a glass blower’s shop, and the then a town called Zunil with a vibrant market where we grabbed some version of street tacos and a bag of sliced mango.

The market in Zunil:

After the market, we rode up a 5 mile hill to some hot springs. The ride was exhausting, but the mountains covered with little lush gardens and vegetable farms were beautiful. The uphill was definitely in the right direction, too, because after a soak at the hot springs, we just had to coast down the long hill, wait at the highway intersection for a bus, and then the bus guy pulled our bikes up on top as if they were nothing, and away we went back to Xela. We thought they might give us trouble about the bike cargo, but it was only 20 cents extra for the two bikes…well worth it.

A nice pit stop in the highlands:

The volcanic soil must make this area perfect for flowers, vegetables, and developing impressive leg muscles while tending to them:

After the ride, when we climbed into the taxi to get back to the house we were staying at, I just happened to feel a plastic bag left in the back seat next to me, and there was something hard inside, kind of like a couple of big blocks. I was intrigued, because I figured it was probably some souvenir or grocery item left by a tourist. Aaron figured out that it was chocolate blocks from the very same shop whose chocolate we had sampled at the food festival a couple of days earlier! It was too bad for whoever left it, but there was no way they were going to find it again, so we didn’t feel too bad taking it and splitting the spoils of the cab ride with our host. He made us some shrimp for dinner, and that ended our time in Xela.

After several bus rides the next morning, some better than others, and most unbelievably packed full of people with various items in tow, we arrived in Panajachel by Lake Atitlan. Besides good food, the town didn’t have a whole lot to offer, but luckily, that’s not where we stayed while we were at the lake. We took a short boat ride to Santa Cruz, and got settled into our room at a pretty hotel by the lake. Our room was more like a little cabin, but it was cute and cozy and you sure couldn’t beat the view. The town was up on a steep hill, and the few hotels were along the lakefront, but it wasn’t trashy by any means. Each hotel offered a 3-course reallllly good family-style dinner each night, so we found the least expensive and just went there every night. The food was delicious, healthy, and there was a ton of it, and it was great just to go and meet other travelers and talk to people that we would otherwise not have met. We talked with another couple teaching in Honduras, a lady in her 50s in the Peace Corps in Belize, some nice British girls, and it was so interesting hearing all of their stories. After dinner, we’d walk along the lake a little bit (it was nearly a full moon while we were there), sit out on a dock awhile, and just take in the view of the lake and volcanoes.

We did a lot of walking during the day, too. There was another little village just about 40 minutes away along the lakeshore, and we went there several times to go to this little café full of old hippies for a cheap internet connection and for Aaron to do a couple phone interviews with schools.

A mind-bogglingly long snake of a cactus along the path:

Just a friend we met along the lakefront path:

One day while Aaron was interviewing, I went up into town and found a little “art gallery” that a family had set up. They explained that they were just getting started and didn’t have a lot yet, but the mother was weaving some really beautiful scarves, one of the daughters made jewelry, and the son painted. I chatted with them for awhile, and then bought a scarf. It’s amazing to me how unaffected that little town has been by the development of tourism. I think that by putting the hotels all down below by the lake, they have been able to keep their town separate and relatively unvisited by tourists (well, except especially pesky ones like me). They speak a combination of 2 different Mayan languages, and most speak Spanish too, so it’d be a really interesting linguistic study to spend some time there.

The town of Santa Cruz, nestled in the hills:

Little kids doing manual labor, women and girls in traditional dress, and people carrying bundles of sticks for their cookstoves are all really common sights:

Not a bad view from Santa Cruz:

One morning, we rented a kayak for a few hours and went along the shore until the wind kicked up. It was nice, but it made me miss our boats back home…a big plastic double is just no comparison to paddling in ours. Anyway, at least we got out while the water was pretty calm, unlike the next couple of people that went out! I did yoga a couple of times with a group class near the water in the mornings, too, which was a great way to start a relaxing day. Our last day there, we did an all-day hike up into the hills behind the lake, past a mini-volcano, through lots of steep cornfields, a windy mountain road (which was VERY scary coming back down with the loose gravel and the sharp drop-offs without guard rails winding down to the lake along cliffs), and finally, to a town called Solola.

The road back from Solola was almost as much an adventure as the path up the mini-volcano:

Solola seemed dead quiet at first, but we soon found out that everyone was in the center of town at market day. We were the only tourists there, and again, being immersed in the colors and smells and busy atmosphere of the market was an experience in itself. At one corner of the plaza, we saw a crowd gathered together and wondered what was going on. Looking over the heads of people (yes, I was actually taller than most of the people of Mayan descent, and I loved it!), we could see some gambling going on in the center. One guy would throw this big cow bone, and depending on how it landed, people would make money off of their bets. So, they were literally “throwing bones,” and it kind of reminded us of the game “Pass the Pigs” if you’ve ever played that. We lingered an hour or so around the market before heading back to Santa Cruz and our 3-course curry dinner with soup (with the most amazing croutons that they make from homemade bread every night) and orange cake. I’m so glad that we got to stay at the lake more than one or two days…four days was about perfect.

On Saturday of Semana Santa, we caught a bus back to Antigua, where we had unexpectedly spent that first night of our vacation. This time, since we had planned on being there, we stayed with another couch surfing host. Her name is Margaret, she’s in her 50s or so, she’s from Connecticut but she’s married to a Guatemalan police officer, and she has 4 cats and a dalmation. She was such a lovely person to stay with; we went walking with her up to a park overlooking the city, and we even took her dog out for a walk on our own one afternoon.

The park had a great view:

Even Sasha, Margaret's dog, stopped to take in the scenery:

Margaret and Sasha also took us to the good places to see the Easter processions and the carpets that decorated the streets. The processions had been going on all week, but the ones we saw that night had a lot of kids swinging smoky lanterns around, a lot of smaller floats carried by people in black robes (after Good Friday, everyone wears black), and one big float with a statue of Jesus on it. These larger floats can weigh thousands of pounds, and in order to carry them, people pay to sign up at different locations throughout the city according to their shoulder height, and then they go to that place at a certain time to get ready for their rotation to begin. The carpets that people make out in the streets are made of flowers, pine needles, fruits, colored sawdust, or whatever else people want to use. The processions last for 12 hours or more sometimes, and there is at least one or two every day leading up to Easter. Suprisingly, Easter Sunday is really not much of a celebration, though. Good Friday and the crucifixion are really the big points of the week.

A close-up of carpet made with sawdust and flowers:

The people that make theirs out of sawdust usually use stencils:

This one is pine needles, palm bits, and flowers:

And the actual processions that trample the carpets:

And here's one of the giant floats, carried by a ton of people and followed by people carrying the generator for the lights:

Since things were quiet on Sunday in town, we took a short bus ride out to a macadamia nut farm. They have a project going there where they give trees to poor farmers so that they can have a good source of income, and they’ve helped a lot of people out through their work. I didn’t even know that Honduras was a big producer of macadamia nuts, but apparently it’s up there after Hawaii and Australia, and maybe South Africa.

Cats are cats everywhere...there must be something theraputic about sleeping on a macademia nut-drying table:

We saw how they are grown, shelled, classified, and we got to taste some chocolate and have a facial and neck massage all as part of the free tour. We ate some blueberry pie and just had a little hammock time in the shade for awhile, and then went back to town and walked down to buy a special treat: bagels!! We went with Margaret to bring her husband some pizza for dinner at the police station. Being in the police force is different there because most of them work an obscene amount of hours and basically live and sleep in the police station. If they have families, their house with them is just for the rare vacation days or occasional nights off.

Antigua was great, but the next morning was a stressful one. We both woke up at 3:30 to catch our 4 am shuttles to different places—Aaron to the airport, and me to Copan as the first step in getting back home to Honduras. Neither of the shuttles was at the house by 4:20, and after wandering the neighborhood in the dark, we found Aaron’s airport bus. We asked if they could call the agency or someone to try to contact the Copan shuttle, since no one seemed to be able to find the address we were at, and I didn’t want to stand out alone on the streets of a city I didn’t know at 4:30 am. The driver said he didn’t have any minutes on his phone, but he agreed to at least take me to the agency where I could wait for the shuttle to come back for me. At the agency, he opened the door and talked to a woman, and then just closed the door and told me to wait outside, and I watched him (and Aaron, and about 15 other tourists) drive away in the minibus. Great. So no one had communicated to me if my shuttle was coming, and no one answered the door when I knocked over and over. I waited out on the dark street for a good half an hour, until 5:00. Finally, another traveler showed up to wait for the 5:00 shuttle. I thought all hope for the early shuttle to Copan was lost, and I’d have to wait for the noon, but then it pulled up and picked me up—an hour late, and in a different location. At least I was on.

Our bus went along fine for about an hour, but then in Guatemala City, it broke down. We all piled out, some people lied down on the sidewalks and went back to sleep, but I just waited in the bus to see what would happen. Another shuttle came along (the now-empty airport shuttle Aaron had been on), and we transferred our luggage and the weary passed-out people that belonged on the shuttle, and then we made it the rest of the way with no major problems. From Copan, I took three more buses that day to get to Gracias and a mototaxi up to Villa Verde around 8, for a total of 15 hours of travel. Having a selective understanding of Spanish helped me out a lot with unwanted male attention, and the only noteworthy occurrence was when, after hearing clucking sounds for awhile, I noticed that there was a chicken under the arm of the little girl sitting right next to me.

This week was a little lonely and boring up on the mountain by myself, but the neighbors checked in on me a lot, and I didn’t feel unsafe at all. One neighbor, an older man, was concerned that I might not be able to fall asleep without Aaron there, so he picked some really tall grasses (in the lemongrass family, he said) that would make a nice, relaxing tea that could double as relief for toothaches, if that was ever a problem. He also told me some passages to read in Psalms, and that the angels would be with me. Another neighbor, who is really more of a friend at this point, came up a couple of times with her son just to chat and bring me some tortillas and beans (can’t have dinner without those!). It’s great to feel so much a part of the community there, and I think we know our neighbors here better than we did in Beverly, and there we lived in the same building as our neighbors, and we worked at the same school as them! I hope that whatever we are next year, we get to know the people in our neighborhood.

Aaron can write his own blog about his trip back to North Carolina for job interviews, but after three lucky interviews, he got a job offer from his top choice school in Durham!!! It’s called Central Park School, and he’s going to be teaching 4^th grade again! So now we both have plans to look forward to when we get back—UNC at Chapel Hill SLP program for me, and teaching at a school that’s a great fit for Aaron. We’re excited that everything has worked out so well so far, and now all we need is a place to live! I wish I could be closer to my family, but I’m glad we get to be near Aaron’s parents, and we both have good friends in the area from college. The only change of plans we have to make is our date of return. We had planned on traveling a little after school gets out in June, but Aaron’s new school has a year-round schedule, so we have to be back in the States by July 6^th for him to start.

That means we only have just over 2 more months…it will go by very fast. It’ll be hard to say goodbye here, but we’re looking forward to being closer to everyone again. Even for those who far from NC, you will be a lot closer for us to visit than you were this year!

Springtime, summer or fall

2009-04-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Guess who is late again with their blog entry. This is about a month overdue and a lot of the credit, especially photos, goes to Brett, Mike and Rach.

It’s hard to believe it’s almost May here. It is now actually summer and it is really hot during the day, but at night we still have nice cool weather. The last couple days have been crazy windy and the wind has kicked up all the dust that has been around since it hasn’t rained in a month. In March we had some friends visit from Boston and we had an awesome time showing them around here and then heading out to the coast. It was so nice having them here, as close friends and family are the only two big things we feel are missing from our life here. We were with them for five days and it went by like a flash.

They came in on Wednesday the 18^th and by the time they got here they had already had a travel adventure. We went down to town after school to meet them (at a hot gas station on the highway) and Melanie checked email and found out their flight was delayed for four hours. This meant they got to do almost all of the drive to Gracias in the dark. They got into Gracias a little after 9, and then we had a quick dinner before piling six people and six people’s things into the car. Our neighbor was out of town for a while and so we were able to use his house for a couple people to sleep in, which made things much more doable with just four in our little place. We woke up the next day, headed to school, and left them to discover Villa Verde on their own. They had a great time at the restaurant up in the park and stayed long enough that she was ready to serve them the next meal.

Dona Alejandrina roasting some coffee.
Some of Dona's tortillas:

They took a little trip to La Campa, but I don’t think that other people are as taken with it as we are. After a dinner at the house, we hit up the hot springs which were popular with everyone.

Melanie with Irma, one of her smartest and most needy kids.

Friday the whole gang came to school and helped out with classes and made quite a splash with the kids. It’s amazing how much smoother everything can go with more than one teacher in the class. Rachel and Brian were awesome helping with our first research project and Mike helped out a lot with adding some volume to the songs we were singing and showing off some crazy Frisbee throws. Brett did a guest reading of the spelling words and made quick friends with one of my students who drew a picture of a baseball game for him before we left. The school also made a hard pitch for all of them to come back to teach next year.

Melanie's class, the way they usually are

As soon as school was finished we made a mad dash for the coast in the jam-packed Mitsubishi Nativa. Mike was a natural Honduran driver, dodging potholes and gunning it past tractor trailers. We made it to San Pedro, grabbed a little food at the mostly-closed bus station and then went on to Ceiba. It was a fun ride with all sorts of good discussion and as the night went on, more and more Disney sing a longs. It’s really interesting to me that that is one of the common bonds of our generation, whereas for the current generation I’m guessing it will be High School Musical that they crank out 15 years down the road. After going through Ceiba, we turned off on a dirt road to head up to the “Jungle River Lodge” which would be our base for white water rafting and ziplining. The road wasn’t that bad but it was a single lane road with no railing 50-75 feet above the river, and we were glad when we finally saw the kayak that the lodge used as a sign. We got settled in our camp cabin-like accommodations and had a tarantula sighting and a few classic card games before we all climbed into our bunks.

Mike's shades definitely give him the edge in this pic

We woke up the next morning excited for rafting, grabbed a quick breakfast and got all our gear and headed up the river. Melanie and I were the most “experienced” rafters and had been telling the others how we were going to be floating down the river with a little bit of paddling now and then on the 3-4 rapids. We found out very quickly that this was not the case. Probably half of the rafting trip was what I would call a river adventure. First, our guide casually explained that we were supposed to swim across the river and meet him on the other side. It’s not a crazy request in words but think about it, this was a whitewater river, usually things go down it not across it. So we had to swim straight up the river really hard and let the current carry us across. About half of us made it across without needing the rescue rope, and by now, we were already exhausted at 8:30 in the morning. We continued to walk and swim upriver for the next half hour until we got to an impassable waterfall and I think we all had a bad feeling about what might be asked of us next. The guide jumped off of a 20 ft rock into a rushing whirlpool, across to the other side, and then scaled a 40-50 ft inverted rock face and then proceeded to do a flip off the cliff back into the whirlpool. He survived, luckily, but none of us wanted to challenge fate or the failure of our muscles. We were still having a hard time wrapping our minds around jumping off the 20 ft rock. The rock wasn’t a straight cliff but a gentle slope so you had to run for a good 20 ft before you came to the point where you could jump off so besides the drop there was the real chance you could fall on the slick rock, break some body part and fall limply into the rushing whirlpool. We all made it across with a lot of cheering and relief and then started back down the river. I thought this was going to be the scariest part, floating back down over rapids, but it actually wasn’t as bad as I had thought. The water shoots your body right over the rapids and besides being shoved under every now and then by the falling water it was a pleasant ride down. When we made it back down to where we had started, we finally got into the rafts and headed down the river with no explanation or instruction. The rapids were awesome, lots of class 4s and a couple 4.5s that were pretty much just 7-8 ft waterfalls that we went over in our boat. Melanie and I, the “experienced” ones, were the only ones who got dumped in the river and our guide would be getting a group high five going while I was floundering to get back into the boat. Our guide was really good though, and we stopped a couple times along the river for him to show us things like a plant that was a natural soap and some big iguanas sunning on some rocks. Although we weren’t really prepared for the first part of the trip it was an amazing rafting trip and surpassed all of our expectations.

Rach on the first zipline heading across the Rio Cangrejal

When we finished rafting we went back to the lodge and they had a huge fruit buffet and we gorged ourselves on fresh cantalope, watermelon, pineapple, and bananas. After a little more formal lunch, we lounged on the rocks next to the river and waited for the second half of our adventure day. Our guide picked us up and we got geared up for riding the wires. We had a brief introduction to ziplining with basic safety tips and a short practice wire to get our “form” right. I kept on thinking that sometime I was going to accidentally put my hands in front of the pulley and get them chopped off. Like the rafting trip, there was a lot of bonus material on top of just riding the wires. After our first big wire across the river, we walked a little while through the jungle checking out different kinds of medicinal and poisonous plants, endangered trees and the highlight of the trip probably, a big termite nest. Our guide showed us the nest and told us that if you get lost in the jungle with no food that termites make a great source of protein. We all thought “Oh interesting” and then he proceeded to share that they tasted just like carrots. At this point I think we were all a little skeptical but then he plunged he hand into the nest and pulled out a handful of live crawling termites. He chomped a few, and sure enough, we could smell some carrots. After a lot of prodding and peer pressure, we all put some live termites in our mouth, chomped down, and sure enough, they were a high-protein carroty treat. The wires were really cool too, ranging from short ones from one platform to another to flying through the branches of trees in the jungle. The last wire was breathtaking, almost 600 feet across a river at a pretty steep angle. You started out in the woods and then came flying out across the river. There was a little bit of miscommunication with the guide though. He was talking to us beforehand and we took it to mean, “This is a long wire and you can take your brake hand off because you will have time to put it back on.” What he really said as we later found out was, “Don’t take your brake hand off the wire because you won’t be able to put it back on and you will crash into a tree.” This we found out through direct experience. It was pretty exhilarating flying across the river spinning around but pretty frightening when I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to stop and came into the platform at 20 mph.

Chilling on the rocks next to the river:

Big Bad Brian focused on the wire

We all made it pretty much unscathed and partook of the fruit buffet one more time before we packed up and headed towards Tela. On our way we made a couple pitstops in La Ceiba to enjoy the outposts of American fast food. At Dunkin Donuts we got a dozen donuts and one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. One of the dozen that we got happened to be a Boston Crème and Brett, trying to be friendly, told the cashier “Soy de Boston” or “I’m from Boston” and she gave him one of the best “Like I care” looks I have ever seen.

After getting a good laugh out of that we made it to Tela and drove around looking for the hotel we were going to stay at. After getting some good yelling at for driving down one ways the wrong way, we made it to the Maya Vista, a beautiful hotel way up on a hill looking over Tela Bay. We took all our stuff inside and were going to head to our room when I found out that I had made a huge travel planning mistake. Because of some early planning and changing plans I had booked the hotel for the wrong nights, and after we didn’t show up the first night, they had taken our deposit and given the room to someone else. I felt so stupid and was just tired from traveling and rafting and ziplining, but eventually the owner helped us find another place that he said was good. He did find us another place, but we soon found out that it wasn’t “good.” There were six of us and we wanted a place we could all stay together, and after looking at the possible rooms, we chose the one that didn’t smell like they had used enough air freshener to cover up a dead body. Was it a good choice? Hard to tell. As soon as we sat down in our new room we saw a huge roach crawl out of the sofa and head towards our Dunkin Donuts. Our first reaction to this was, “Crap, he’s going to try and eat our donuts” and so we had to keep the donuts in the car. Mike tried to hit another roach with his shoe, and although we all swore that he hit it, when he lifted his shoe it wasn’t there, adding to the mystique of these superintelligent disappearing creatures.

Ahh, roach motel

After calming down a little bit we headed out for some dinner and found a really nice place with good Caribbean rice and beans and some fried fish that came entero with their eyes looking right at you. Mike did a good Big Mouth Billy Bass impression. We also had a traveling mariachi (I think) band come by and play a few songs and their first one was really good, but when we tried a request (it ended up being La Bamba) they flopped.

Honduran Caribbean Typical Food:

Mike with his old disappearing fish trick. As you can tell Rach is thoroughly "impressed."

After making it through the night in the literal roach motel we were glad to pack up and move back to the hotel we had originally wanted to stay. In the morning we went and explored the Tela market. In my mind it wasn’t quite as good as the Gracias market, but they did have a lot more fish. We found some good snacks like quesadillas with a piece of fried chicken in it, and then some fresh squeezed orange juice.

Tela is home to the second largest tropical botanical gardens in the world, so we thought that would be a good way to spend the morning. The gardens used to be private gardens of one of the banana barons but now it is public. There were lots of nice paths to walk on, and the first part of the walk was through the densest bamboo tunnel I had ever seen. Although there wasn’t too much information about the individual plants, it was educational to see several different types of one family of plants growing together. There were probably 10 different kinds of palm trees and some really beautiful giant eucalyptus trees.

Never would have even thought of it but yes, there are red pineapples.

Some of the bamboo

They also had an exhibit on the first man:

Our afternoon goal was to make it to Miami, a Garifuna beach a little smaller than its American counterpart. We had seen some pictures of it and it looked like it was just a big barrier sandbar with palm trees and a few huts on it. Although it was only 5 or 6 miles away, we soon discovered that we probably weren’t going to make it, since the road was even worse than our road up the mountain. Although the beach we settled for may not have been quite as idyllic as Miami, it had clean sand and warm water and that was all we wanted. We went to the beach at this beach club that we assumed would just kick us out, but we swam, lounged on the beach, and had some fierce volleyball games and they didn’t seem to mind at all. At this point, Melanie and I were getting a little jealous that everybody else was going to get to stay and hang out at the beach and we had to go to work the next day. We headed back towards Tela, got settled at our hotel and had a nice dinner looking out at the ocean.

We had seen that there was a fair in town, and although we had seen the less than splendid fairs in Gracias, this one looked like it might have more to offer. After walking through all the fried chicken vendors to get there, we were pleasantly surprised to find out there was no entrance fee, you just buy tickets for the games or food at will. The first thing that caught our attention were the bumper cars. I’m a huge fan of bumper cars and was really excited to get in on the action, but I couldn’t figure out how the system worked. I could tell you had to buy a ticket, but I had no idea what you were supposed to do next. There was no line, no one collecting tickets, but after a while we sort of figured out what was going on. The ticket you bought was actually a plastic token; when a buzzer went off all the cars stopped everyone started running around like crazy. This is because although all the cars stopped at the same time everyone was trying to run from the side to one of the cars before someone who had lots of tokens put another in their car and started aiming for knocking peoples’ knees off. It added a whole other degree of difficulty to everything. After feeling like we had conquered the bumper car circuit, we headed over to the spider arm spinny thing. This is another classic, with a little more stomach churning and although it was the exact same ride they have in the States, it lasted at least twice as long. Mike and Rach were lucky and got the crazy car that was spinning a couple of times a second and somehow they both kept their supper in.

Do they put a mix of owl and dog in these delicacies?

This is before the Puk-0-matic 3000 gets going
You might say I'm a little competitive with the bumper cars

We walked around the fair a little while longer and skipped some of the scarier rides. I think the scariest looking ride of all was the Ferris wheel. I’ve always thought of the Ferris wheel as this kind of leisurely “let’s admire the view” kind of ride, but in Honduras they have a different take on it. The huge wheel probably does a revolution every three seconds with everyone on it shrieking and then after 30 seconds or so they brake it and spin it the other way. For anyone who has read Devil in the White City that’s sort of how I imagine people felt when they rode the first Ferris wheel at in 1893. We were looking for some good carnival food but couldn’t find anything other than the normal fried chicken and French fries. We headed back to the hotel and got all packed up to head back towards Gracias the next day.

The next morning we all woke up, got some good fruit at the market, and partook of the great coastal baleadas one last time. We went out to the highway and said our goodbyes, really sad to leave everyone, and not exactly excited about our full day bus trip back. We feel so lucky to have such good friends and even luckier that they would come to Honduras and see our world here. If they’re reading: Thanks guys for being such a great group to travel with and hopefully we can do it again soon!

A-wandering along the mountain path

2009-03-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

So much for the hot season so far. It’s summer here now, but I was dreading oppressive heat and dust, and the weather really hasn’t been too bad. A lot of mornings start out rainy or cloudy, and then by mid-morning, the sky is clear and it does start heating up. I recently planted some herbs and flowers in front of the house, so maybe this will be good weather to give it a better start than the other garden out back. In that one, we have a few renegade tomato plants growing from the compost we mixed into the soil, but besides that, just some bean plants and a couple of tiny watermelon plants have really grown much. Apparently, we put our garden on the wrong side of the house to begin with. That side of the house was excavated to make the adobe bricks to build the house, and the other side has a little less damage, so it would have been better…ah, hindsight.

A couple of weekends ago, we finally packed up our backpacks with camping gear and food and headed up the mountain—all the way up. The hike started in the familiar territory of the park, up to the visitor’s center, across the river twice, up the steep switchbacks to the fork with the waterfall-bound path, and then we crossed into the unknown (for us…lots of other people have been, obviously). The trail meandered up and down and in different directions as it hugged smaller mountainsides and crossed several little creeks/waterfalls where we filled up our water bottles. The water was really clear and straight from the ground, but we dropped in the nasty iodine pills just to be kind to our digestive systems. Around this part of the hike, we saw a lot of GIANT ferns that looked more like small trees than ground cover. Here is a baby fern all curled up:

We stopped for lunch at the first “campsite,” which was just an old building site littered with garbage and a pit toilet. That made me a little worried about the second campsite, which we were planning to stay at for the night. Still, it was a nice lunch in the sun, and everything tastes better when you’re hiking.

Campsite that I'm glad we didn't stay long at:

We went on from there, and the climb got a lot steeper. We followed a ridge for awhile, so the view was fantastic sometimes, and we also saw a little animal—our only real wildlife spotting of the trip. It looked like a raccoon/monkey/weasel, and was about the size of a large housecat. It had a long, striped tail, and just looked at us a little while, stood up on its legs like a prairie dog, and kept on climbing and exploring, like we weren’t even there. The vegetation changed many times, and the plants were amazing as we went on. Besides the giant ferns, we saw beautiful flowers, vines, bromeliads, really knotty old trees, interesting fungi…it was the jungle, and it didn’t disappoint. Once we reached the cloud forest, though, it felt like we had entered a different world. The canopy is so thick that it’s pretty dark, but the sunlight that does come through creates a green halo around all of the trees because of the thick moss covering them. We heard lots of birds, but we couldn’t spot them because everything up there was so thick and full of green life.

Here's us up in the cloud forest:

And an attempt to capture the canopy...it definitely doesn't do it justice, though:

We were going to call it quits for the day when we got to the second camp, but we got there around 3, and we figured we still had at least 3 hours of daylight, so we would either pass the time playing cards and looking for monkeys in the trees (a fruitless endeavor, unfortunately), or we could push on to the top and then come back to camp and just have to wake up and hike down the next day. We opted for option 2, and it was a good choice. The top was just another 1.5 hours, and it was all through cloud forest. The summit itself was mostly wooded, even though it was at about 9500 ft, so there was just one place where you could look out at the green mountains surrounding us. That little window was an incredible view, and it just felt good to finally have made it up the mountain that we spend most of our time at the base of.

At the sign...

And another of us (maybe a little to up-close):

Here's the view from where you could see out at the top. We were lucky that we got a view at all, since the top is often covered in clouds that cling to the mountain.

We headed back to the campsite, which turned out to be wayyyy better than the first campsite we ate lunch at, put up the tent, ate some leftover lentil soup out of peanut butter jars (we didn’t have the energy to make a fire or cook), and crawled into our sleeping bags around 7, just after dark. It was amazing up there, but a lot colder, too. We could see our breath, and it was a COLD night in the tent! I also woke up several times thinking that Aaron breathing was actually some kind of animal lurking around outside planning its attack on our tent.

Morning came, we made it back down in just a few hours, and then we showered, snacked, and napped for awhile. Sleeping in a tent in a freezing forest with jeans for a pillow makes you appreciate your own bed soooo much. We really enjoyed the whole experience, though…surprisingly, although it’s the main tourist attraction in Gracias (not that there are many), a lot of people that live here have never hiked to the top, but I wouldn’t miss it.

Our neighbors, on the other hand, who are guides in the park, go up there all the time, and say that they get slightly annoyed by the tourists because they have to stop and rest so much. Their family has been so generous and friendly toward us this whole time we’ve been here, though. They’ve taught me how to make pupusas, tamales (which is VERY labor-intensive, the way they do it down here), and I’m going to make tortillas with them sometime after school when I don’t completely wiped. I’m happy that Sonia, the woman that I mainly cook with and talk to, wants to learn how to make pizza, so we can at least have a little exchange going on.

We went over to their house for Paola’s birthday this weekend. Paola is in my class, and she’s one of the sweetest kids I have. She knows everybody’s business all the time, and calls me out on every contradiction I make, but she is always giving out stickers, lending her school supplies to friends (which is a big deal here), and her arm is probably really strong from being practically constantly raised in class. She comes over to my house a lot just to say hello, play around with sticks or chalk or her cousins, or to get homework help. She has a lot of friends at school, but they couldn’t really make it up to her house for the party, since it’s not too conveniently located to town, so the party was just her family and us. We had beef, beans, tortillas, and cake. There was a minor catastrophe when her little cousin locked herself in a bedroom, but another relative was able to crawl between the roof and the wall to unlock the door before she had even stopped being entertained by jumping on the bed and having people talk to her through the window. We played with the kids, sang Happy Birthday, and just hung out a little while. I hope it was a good birthday for Paola…I think it was; she’s easy to please, and she got 3 whole packs of new stickers.

At school, our classes are doing pretty well. Their English is coming along, and I’ve noticed some really great breakthrough moments with some of my struggling kids, lately. I’ve been able to switch up the help class roster, my lowest reader can now read multi-syllable words and identify most letter sounds (although short and long vowels are still tricky for everyone since they don’t have that in Spanish). One of my lowest kids at the beginning of the year is now one of my highest level kids, and has done a lot of fake dramatic fainting onto the floor lately upon receiving his test grades back. Not everything has been rosy, but things like that are really encouraging. Both of our classes have had a lot more drama and crying lately…I think they just need a few days off to play and recharge. Some of the girls in my class are getting into a boy-crush phase, too, which has upped the drama and gossip level lately, too. Today, a couple of them even gave letters to the 8^th graders that they like, telling them up front that they are their “secret love.” A little out of their league, but they’re just having fun teasing each other and having secrets with their friends. Still, I don’t remember a lot of that going on when I was in third grade.

My class finished our animal unit awhile ago, and we made clay animals, shoebox habitats, and collected information about them for a classroom zoo. The kids had a lot of fun with that, and I wish that I had taken pictures. Aaron’s kids came to look at the exhibits and hear the presentations, and they did a good job keeping their more critical thoughts to themselves, except for one girl who tattled by saying: “Carlos say that Deyssi’s elephant looks like—como se dice (how do you say)—bleehhhh (with vomit sound and motion).” This week, we had a cricket jumping contest, and graphed the cricket jump distances vs. the jumps the kids did. They had so much fun running around and catching insects, and I loved helping them and just kicking back and exploring with them outside the classroom.

Aaron’s class has been busy, too. They’re studying birds right now, and he had them cut out life-size wings of different species, measure their own wingspans, and right now, they’ve been playing a migration game he made up. It involves two big cardboard dice, a big chalk map of the Americas, and the kids having to try to make the trip without losing members of their flock. Sounds a little reminiscent of Oregon Trail for birds, but without the wagon to caulk or Jimmy getting a snakebite.

Here's Marcos, one of Aaron's kids, in the nest he made. Both of our classes actually did this activity...pretty entertaining way to spend a Science class!

Tomorrow afternoon, some friends from Landmark will be in Gracias to visit for a week! This weekend, we’re going to the coast for some rafting and relaxing at the beach with them. It’s so great to have visitors to look forward to and spend time with! Hopefully, we’ll have better luck with the rental car this time. We’ll be better about taking pictures while people are here, so look forward to some good ones on the next post! If you read this, thanks…it means a lot to us.

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

2009-03-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

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.

So many homes

2009-01-28T18:15:00.000-08:00

Not a bad place to come back to...every sunset and sunrise (yes, I am awake for all of those as well) is beautiful.

Christmas break seems like a long time ago, but since that’s where our last entry left off, I’ll travel back in time for a minute. Stepping off the plane in one degree Chicago weather was a little rough after being on a tropical island the day before, but my mom and sisters brought some old winter coats to meet us at the airport, and from there, we just got used to the climate change. It was so great to be home and see everyone in so many places. We spent the first 3 days in Wheaton with my family, did 3 Christmases there—one on Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, and Christmas night in Wisconsin.

Here's Christmas Eve...my sisters, Caitlin and Rachel, and my cousins, Chelsea and Olivia:

...and Mimi and Aaron:

...and my parents:

In Wisconsin, we got to enjoy the snow a little more, and even cleared off an ice rink on the lake to play a little hockey. We just spent a couple of days, and then we headed back to Wheaton. A note on Hela, our cat: she is enjoying her year-long vacation with her dog cousins, and has learned to play with the border collie. They wrestle around and chase each other, and when they are tired, the dog lies on her back and the cat sits on the dog’s face. Very weird. Hela has also gotten pretty fat because she eats dog food all day. She doesn’t look like she’s been missing us too badly.

Here's the little fatty on Christmas:

Everywhere we went, the food tasted amazing, but going from mostly fruits and veggies to American-style holiday food was a rude awakening for our digestive systems. I don’t think either of us felt hungry the whole time we were back home, but we still pigged out as per tradition and felt happy and comfortable and loved the whole two weeks we spent visiting.

Here's one of the richer indulgences of 2009: Oreo Cheesecake! (With my mom and brother, Brad):

I thought we might experience a little more reverse culture shock, but once we were back, everything just seemed normal, like we had never left. When we got back to Honduras, again, it just seemed as if we had never left. It was a relief to be back here and not have to get used to things all over again like we did in August when we first arrived.

After Wheaton and Wisconsin, we met Aaron’s brother and sister-in-law (well, basically), and drove down to Virginia to spend a few days with Aaron’s family. It was a Christmas miracle that all of our stuff fit in the tiny Yaris along with four of us and a dog, but it all worked out. It was still nothing compared to some of the bus experiences we’ve had! There was a serious lack of bags of crops and grains, and there were no kids sitting on top of the seats hanging out the windows.

Virginia was a little warmer than up North, so we got a little walking and biking in…biking on a paved road was amazing. It was really nice to spend time with all of Aaron’s family at once, because they are so spread out that it doesn’t happen often. We had a little photo shoot out back on the mountain...

Here are Daniel (Aaron's brother) and Meghan (his fiancee), with their rarely-sitting-still-much-less-yawning-of-boredom dog:

And here are Jeremy (Aaron's brother), Meghna (his wife), and Alaina (our niece):

All four brothers:

And everybody:

Our Christmas tour had one more stop: Beverly, MA. We stayed there 3 days, did some much-enjoyed grocery shopping, saw lots of friends, and re-visited our favorite restaurants. It was hard to leave and fly back here at the end of the trip, but I think the part we were most dreading was just the long travel adventure we had before getting back to our house. We’re going to be so happy to be back with friends and family next year, though…our trip was way too short!

We left Boston at 4 pm, stopped in Ft. Lauderdale, took a 9 something flight to San Pedro Sula in Honduras, arrived at 1 am, and waited in the airport for several hours waiting for morning to come. Luckily, there was a little area to sit down in next to a closed Wendy’s booth (we were afraid that the whole place would shut down and we’d have to figure out somewhere to spend a few hours). Our bus didn’t leave until 6, so we killed some time just talking to another foreign teacher coming back to Honduras from the States, and then Aaron tried to use an ATM. There were two machines right next to each other, and they looked about the same. Aaron typed in the amount he wanted to withdraw (about $100), and the machine just shut down. He checked the balance of our account using the other ATM, and it turns out that the first machine had subtracted the amount from our account without giving us any cash! He asked a policeman about it, and the guy just laughed at him and said something along the lines of, “oh, you used THAT machine?! Everyone knows that machine doesn’t work!” So…not so helpful. After we found a ride to the bus station, took our two buses back to Gracias, and did some grocery shopping, we stopped off at the bank for a little chat about our ATM situation. This turned out to just be the first of three visits in order to get our lost money back, but eventually, it worked out. At one point, though, our account got down to about $15. Close call!

When we finally got up the mountain and home again, we got to unpack and relax for a day before school started. Our house was fine over break, and besides a missing rusted wheelbarrow and a sweater eaten by some animal, all was well when we got back. It didn’t take long to get used to wearing t-shirts again, and spending most of our time outside. No seasonal affect disorder here…there have been a couple of other cold fronts, but the rainy season is now over, and it’s just going to keep warming up from here on out. It’s really good that we live up on the mountain now, because it gets really hot and dusty in town without rain, and up here it gets hot during the day, but always cools down at night. One night during the cold front last week, we seriously considered moving the stove into our bedroom and baking bread to heat things up before we went to sleep, but in the end, it wasn’t worth the risk of something in the oven coming loose during the move. It’s easy to pick out the tourists during the cold weather, though…they are usually wearing shorts and a t-shirt, while everyone who lives here is wearing sweaters and hats. We did meet one really interesting couple from Quebec last weekend. They looked to be in their late 50s or so, and they had driven all the way down from Quebec! They had their yellow lab with them, and they were just road tripping for a couple of months before ending up in El Salvador to visit their son, who is doing some volunteer work/surfing down there for a year. They have an ecotourism business in Mexico and they do a lot of kayaking there, so who knows, we might meet them again sometime.

Our neighbors did a lot of work on their comedor (little restaurant in their house) while we were gone, and they stopped us and invited us in for some coffee and sweetbread one afternoon. We’re slowly getting to know them better—one of their kids is in my class, and she’s been walking to school with us every day. All the kids like coming up to our house to giggle and chat and play little games like “who can balance a stick on their head and walk across the road fastest” or “where is Abby’s stomach/nose/eyes/ears?” I don’t always rush out eagerly when I hear that “Oh Mrs. Seeeeeebens/Mrs. Melaaaaaaanie” coming through the gate outside, but they’re really sweet kids, and it’s fun to play with them…kids are so easy to please and so carefree. A couple of weekends ago, and probably tonight as well, we went to the neighborhood church. There are only about 10 or 15 people that go there, and it’s just a little one-room cinder-block building. It’s decorated inside with a sheet and letters cut out and glued on it, and there are a few simple benches and a table up front. One guy plays the keyboard, and they sing a lot of pretty long praise songs where everyone just sings and claps. While they sing and during the sermons/readings, which are also done by family members, the little kids just kinda run around and play with the odd broom or cup lying around, leave their bottles or toys on the table holding the keyboard up front, and just find ways to entertain themselves without anyone trying to make them sit down. We couldn’t understand all of the preaching, but from what I gathered, the message wasn’t fire and brimstone, but just more about acting out faith every day and not just at church. The atmosphere was so laid-back and simple, and my favorite moment was when the power went out for a minute or so during one of the songs. The keyboard didn’t work, but everyone just kept singing in the dark, and then eventually it and the lights came back on before the song was over. We’re probably going again today, not necessarily because we get a lot out of it in a religious sense, but just because it’s a good way to spend time with our neighbors and be able to share some experience with them. I wish we could go with them to pick coffee sometime or help them work in the field every once in a while, but we’re pretty booked every weekday with school.

We have a new neighbor now as well—another Gringo from the U.S. He’s just graduated from a Master’s program in Spanish, and he’s here staying at his friend’s house for a few months just to practice Spanish and figure out what he wants to do next. He doesn’t have electricity, screens on the windows, or any of the luxuries we have (like internet and a hot shower), so he’s roughing it a lot more than we are. He has more time to get to know the other neighbors, and he goes to town more often than we do. Mostly, though, I think he just reads a LOT of books. He’s had some helpful tips on our garden, though, so we’ve given that another shot. This time, the weather should be better, and we added a lot of manure from the road to the soil, so that should help fertilize. If all goes well, we should see some sprouts in a few days.

It was nice to see our kids at school again after break. Things in my class have been going really well, but I’m attributing at least part of that to the absence of my most high-maintenance student whose family is taking a vacation in Guatemala right now. He’s a nice kid, but he drains so much of my energy all day long, and it’s been nice to be able to put that energy into my other students and successfully carry out more creative lessons. The second quarter ends next week, so then we’ll officially be halfway through the year. The school just started 2 new classes, a younger one and an older one, for almost 40 new students. I’m not sure what that puts our total enrollment up to, but it’s a significant chunk of new kids. They are just learning English this Spring, and the plan is to have them integrated into the regular classes next fall. This means that there is no space for storage, library, or planning anymore, though. We just sit outside on the ground somewhere during free periods, and the teachers that have lots of free time (the music and art teachers) just kind of walk around and try to look somewhat busy by talking to the administrators or the cleaning ladies or texting on their phones. The new kids don’t have their uniforms yet, though, and one day last week I saw a girl wearing a white tank top over a t-shirt. The tank top said: “Buy me a shot…I’m tying the knot” in iron-on letters. I’m pretty sure she got that secondhand somewhere, and I’m also pretty sure that neither she nor any of the administrators knew what that meant.

At school, the administration has started doing teacher evaluations. This consists of pulling out two “random” students from class, checking their notebooks, and looking through their work-text books to see how much has been completed. Then, if you are a woman, they meet with you to tell you to use the books more or that you are doing a good job, or if you are a man, they just avoid confronting you and say nothing. Not the most effective evaluation, in my opinion, but I guess it’s just another one of those things that comes down to cultural differences in the workplace.

Aaron’s kids have been working on a garden in back of the school lately. They are really excited about it, and are getting pretty competitive about which garden bed will be best. Aaron asked them to bring in old clothes to work in, and some of them are pretty funny, too…for example, one girl just brought a pink dress to wear over her clothes. It’s funny to look out back of the school and see a bunch of kids doing manual labor, but they love it and it’s a great chance to get out of the classroom.

Here's Leonela in her pink work dress:

Jenny in the orange shirt and all the kids doing their manual labor/wandering:

David and Marquito hard at it:

My class took another river trip last week to catch tadpoles as part of our amphibians and reptiles unit. Again, there were some noteworthy outfits on display, like the girl who wore a ballerina leotard as a swimsuit, or the boy who just wore his boxers.

Jasson and Fausto, two of my favorites:

Kimberly catching tadpoles in her ballet outfit:

Maria Jose (Mary Joseph...actually a common name) in her swimsuit with the other kids:

Deyssi and Lorean, cold:

Fausto again, mid-action:

It’d be nice to think of more field trips to do, but it’s hard due to lack of transportation. I want to try to get my kids outside more in the second half of the year, though…they’re finally at the point where they can handle it and not just go completely nuts once we leave the classroom. One big exception to this statement: a couple of weeks ago, some students from the Abundant Life school in Tegucigalpa came to our school, half to do a mission presentation, and half to play soccer. We didn’t find out about this until a few minutes before the soccer game, but we were supposed to bring all of our students up to the field to watch. It had been raining a lot, so it was muddy and slippery, and most of the kids just made mudballs, slid down the hills on boards, climbed trees, collected seeds and flower petals, or found some way to entertain themselves besides watching the game. They were a bunch of monkeys, but it was a lot of fun to just let them go wild and sit back and take pictures and laugh.

A couple of kids "watching the soccer game":

And here's an average day in the lunch line:

This weekend, we did our usual town day, and then some friends came up and we grilled chicken and veggies on the fire and they stayed overnight on our spare mattress. We got sheets for them and everything, so now we’re all set for our visitors to come! Our first ones are my friend Amy from college and her cousin. They’ll be here in 2 weeks! After that, Aaron’s parents are coming for a week, some friends from Landmark are coming, my parents might come, a couple more friends are coming for a vet mission trip, and maybe a friend of mine from home will come, too! We can’t wait to have everybody and show them around our life here!

There isn’t a lot else to report, but life is good, and we’re happy to be missing out on winter! It’s hard not to think about next year, and we do think about it a lot, but we’re trying to just enjoy our time here and take advantage of everything we have.

December in Honduras

2009-01-06T15:13:00.000-08:00

Its kind of strange to post to the blog now. I’m writing as we’re on a plane back to the States for Christmas, and there are lots of different thoughts swirling around but we’re both really excited to be going back to see everyone, we’re actually excited for cold weather and by the time January comes around I’ll think we’ll be plenty excited to get back to balmy Honduras.

Melanie left off with some discussion of the devotion of school resources to the Christmas program and I will fill you in on how that adventure turned out. As Melanie was saying before, the two weeks before school ended we didn’t really have many classes and when we actually did have class there were 40 kids practicing a dance outside of our classroom. We weren't exactly open minded when we heard about it. We both had kind of a negative opinion of the program going into the 2 weeks of practice, it was just very different from the type of Christmas programs we both remembered participating in. The bulk of the program (The 12 Voices of Christmas) was monologues of the Christmas story, interspersed with praise and worship songs that the kids danced to. One of the main issues we had with the play was how little the students got to participate. Each grade or two had one song that they danced to and then for the rest of the show they just had to sit in the audience while students from Tegucigalpa lip-synched the monologues. So for the two weeks leading up to the performance each grade practiced their dance somewhere between 40-50 times. The way we practiced was to watch a DVD of the school in the Tegucigalpa doing the program and just copy it, so there was little creative input from us. It was hard to see what was going on in the DVD because of all the changing camera angles, but after 20 or so times we pretty much got the hang of it. The other twenty times were spent with kids in my grade reminding me I missed some move or teaching them at what angles they should hold their fake trumpets.
Here is one of the snacks of the kids at practice for the Christmas program, potted meat and a frosted flakes "granola bar":

Everyday it seemed like their was some casualty whether it be someone’s maraca getting broken, someone getting elbowed in the face when they went the wrong way in the dance, or some tears breaking forth because they didn’t win the audition for air guitar solo.
Four of my students in "the band" for our dance. The guitar solo was the envy of the entire elementary school:
It was also kind of crazy because the performance was at a church in town and so the three days before the performance we had to go to the church and practice. The entire school went and watched while each grade did their dance once on the stage and the rest of the time was crowd control. We had a dress rehearsal the day of the performance with the students from Tegucigalpa and this was directed by the drama director at their school. I personally was not a huge fan of the drama director. He showed up in really short shorts and running shirt (think gym teachers from the 80’s) and proceeded to give a little speech to our kids. The main gist of the speech was telling our students that even though they were from Gracias they could be just as good as the students from Tegucigalpa. I don’t think he meant it this way and I don’t think many of the students perceived it this way but to me it was very patronizing. I have experienced a lot of bias against people who live in rural areas and it seems like it is a pretty universal thing. The drama teacher did not think of our students as equals, he thought that if they tried really hard they could be at the same level of his students. That was just a little thorn in the side but he did a couple of other things that made me question the way he deals with people. Before my class went up on stage to dance I was going around to each of them telling them good luck and have fun and he came over to shoosh me. Later on during the performance I started to clap along with one of the other songs and he signaled to me from across the room very demonstratively to stop clapping. Now I’m not one for dressing up or a dress code but while all the other teachers were dressed up in their school uniforms, he showed up in a wind suit to the most important school event of the year. That all is a little cynical and slightly negative and I don’t want to give the idea that the program was this torturous thing that was a flop, because it actually went extremely well.
The 4th grade before the show:

We only got to practice the play one time with everyone, so I was a little nervous how it would go with so little practice and preparation. In Honduras there are lots of times when I think, sheesh there is no way that can work, its slipshod, no preparation, but then it turns out that it works great. In the States we have all the expectations and laws for how things have to be done but in Honduras as long as it works then its ok. So in line with that, the Christmas program went great.
Some of Melanie's kids before the show:
The kids all had a lot of fun, the parents were really happy seeing their kids perform and the kids did a great job. This also hit home another point for me. In the four months that we’ve been here I haven’t been open-minded about a lot of things. School is very different than schools I’ve been to or worked at before and too often if something is done in a different way I assume that it won’t work or respond to it in a negative way, and that is something that I really want to change.

There was also some great news the last day when we were practicing for the Christmas program. The administrators from Tegucigalpa were in Gracias to check out the program and they decided that we wouldn’t have class the next week, that the program would be the last day of school for the year. We weren’t flying back until the 22nd so that gave us more than a week to travel. Eunice (the school superintendent) also worked it out so that we could have a free place to stay in La Ceiba, the third biggest city in Honduras and a hoppin beach town. Melanie and I cobbled together some plans very quickly and arranged it so that we could take Spanish classes during that week. We had a lot to do before we left on Sunday especially considering that we were planning on having a Christmas party at our house on Saturday to use up our food. So Saturday we had to pack, clean, and get ready for the party and get our house ready to be closed for a few weeks. The party was also the maiden voyage of our “grill”. The grill was some sticks with nails spaced evenly and one of those camping grill baskets that you can move up and down on the nails over our fire pit. We had some burgers and dogs and some tandoori chicken skewers that Melanie made and the grill did quite well, although I think it will be better served for smaller scale operations. We had a huge table of desserts, more than we’d had the entire time we’d been in Honduras. There were cinnamon rolls, brownies, key lime pie, sugar cookies, cheesecake, and eggnog. We had another big stroke of luck at the party; Someone who came to the party was actually heading to San Pedro Sula the next day and offered to give us a ride, and he even came and picked us up at our house! We didn’t even know how we were going to make it down the mountain with all of our stuff and we were saved the 5 hour bus ride as well. This made it seem a lot more like vacation. When you have to be crammed on 3 buses constantly watching your stuff it isn’t exactly relaxing.

We caught a bus from San Pedro to La Ceiba where our host met us at the bus terminal. It was really nice of our administrator to find a place for us to stay and it was really nice of the people to host us (they were very friendly and hospitable), but it was also a little awkward because they moved their daughters out of their bedrooms so that we and the other couple could sleep in them. Their house was really nice, with a really funky swimming pool, but it was far out of town so we either had to ask them for rides or take taxis everywhere. The pool looked like something from a mini-golf course with really intricate concrete work and decoration; it even had a grotto that you could swim into with seats to relax in.

We started Spanish classes on Monday morning, both of us with a different personal tutor. I think it was really good for both us in different ways. We spent four hours each morning of the week studying and speaking with our tutor. I think it will make a huge difference in my Spanish when we come back. I’ve picked up a lot of Spanish words during our time here, but having never studied Spanish formally, I don’t really know any grammar. Even though we had to start back at square one grammar wise I think I’ll be able to synthesize grammar and vocabulary pretty quickly. Melanie seemed to get a lot out of her classes as well, but for her it was more a review of advanced subjunctive forms and an opportunity to spend a lot of time talking to someone whose job it is to correct you. Hopefully when we come back to Honduras we will both have more tools for our Spanish and a little more confidence to go with it.

La Ceiba itself was not a town that we would probably spend a lot of time in again, but since we were there for a week we got to enjoy lots of things that we’ve been missing up on the mountain. Within the first two days there, we had already gone to Pizza Hut twice, which is more times than both of us had been in the last ten years. The first time we went to Pizza Hut for the food but the second time was for the super high speed (for us) wireless internet. Restaurants like Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Wendys are really different here. The buildings are extremely big and modern looking and since the food is a little more expensive than it is in the states, it is really expensive here and only upper middle class and upper class people can afford to eat there. The whole week we were in La Ceiba we had to eat out so we had ample opportunities to sample the fast food fare the city had to offer, and those Whoppers and Frostys sure tasted pretty good after a few months of not having any beef or ice cream. Another feature that appealed to us was the fact that it had two movie theaters. It wasn’t like they had amazing movies or anything (we actually sat through all of Stepbrothers) but since we haven’t even watched TV just sitting there with the flashing images in front of us made us feel right at home and it also helped that it only cost a dollar.

Everyday after Spanish class we would either explore La Ceiba (finished that in one day), or other towns and areas around La Ceiba. There wasn’t too much to see in Ceiba itself, with the beaches being contaminated and night clubs not really being our thing, but the thing about Ceiba is that there are beautiful places just a couple of miles away. From Ceiba itself you can see Pico Bonito National Park which is several gravity defyingly steep peaks completely covered with jungle. Even though the peaks are only five miles from the entrance to the park, it takes at least a week to reach them, and those days apparently are spent hacking through the jungle and fending off mosquitoes and vipers. Whenever a group does decide to climb the mountain everyone follows it in the paper and on TV because either something bad happens or they make it out triumphantly.
We didn’t brave the snakes and climb the mountain but we did get to explore lots of other good places. One afternoon after class it was especially hot and we wanted to go to a beach where we could actually swim, so we caught a bus and headed ten miles down the coast to Sambo Creek. The beach at Sambo wasn’t pristine by any means but compared to Ceiba it was paradise island. We walked down the beach to a place where we could change and realized that we both had forgotten our swimsuits. Normally this would have been resolved by skinny dipping but because of recent flooding the water had so much debris in it, skinny dipping didn’t seem like a great option. The solution we came up with was to sit on the beach and relax which served our situation quite well.

We heard about a good swimming hole the next day that was freshwater and set out to find out about it. We rode the bus a couple miles down the road again and got off a little ways down the river from the swimming hole. There was a road/ path next to the river and we followed it for 20-30 minutes until we could hear the waterfall. All along the way there were houses with small farms situated along the river with huge trees shading the houses and water, very peaceful and picturesque. After walking for a little while the path headed uphill and we got a nice view of the land between us and the sea, full of banana plants and nice places to live.
Eventually we heard the loud water and plunged down through thick plants to the waterfall. The waterfall was probably 20 ft high and 20ft wide with a deep blue tennis court sized pool at the bottom, in other words exactly what we had been looking for.
The waterfall on the Rio Maria:
As soon as we got there some local kids showed up and started playing around on the waterfall. I’ve seen people jump off of waterfalls and stuff but these kids were sliding down the waterfall, which to me seemed really scary and like instant death (who knows what kinds of rocks are under the fall) but each time they emerged unscathed. We spent a couple of hours there swimming, jumping off lower rocks, lying on rocks, and just enjoying the cool air courtesy of the river. We didn’t really want to go back to Ceiba but we figured we probably should before it got dark. We spent another afternoon just figuring out bus service for getting to the airport and then on Friday we headed back to the Rio Maria waterfall for another dose of cool water relaxation. We finished up classes for the week and although we liked it a lot and got a lot out of it, I can’t imagine doing Spanish classes for a month. A week was a nice boost for us and hopefully we’ll be a little more motivated to practice.

One of the sailboats they use in the Cayos, with a sail made of trashbags

The crown jewel of our adventure in Ceiba though was our weekend trip to the Cayos Cochinos, a protected marine reserve of keys about 15 miles off the coast of Ceiba. There are two big keys which are used for marine research and most of the smaller keys are private and either are someone’s vacation home or uninhabited.
Some volcanic rock off one of the keys
We went out with a local tour operator and learned a little about the islands before doing some snorkeling. I didn’t know before we went but off the coast of Honduras is the second largest barrier reef in the world after Australia. We got on our gear and headed under to check it out and it was stunning, stretching for as far as you could see were probably ten different kinds of coral, some 20 feet high with 5 or 6 different kinds of fish swimming in and out. We snorkeled for an hour or so swimming in and out of the coral before getting back on the boats and heading to the one island in the keys that is inhabited called Chachahuate. Its pretty small, maybe a little bigger than a football field and somewhere between 50-75 people live on the island.

A view of the entire island of Chachahuate

Another perspective of the island
There is one restaurant on the island and we had the best fish I’ve had in years with really good red beans and rice. The rest of the tour group went back to Ceiba but we wanted to do something on our own so we decided to stay on the island in a little hostel/cabin thing they have. All of the people on the island are Garifuna which means they are a long way descended from shipwrecked slaves in the 1800s. Living on a tiny island with 75 people might seem like some kind of tortured reality show but after spending a day there we saw what they had going. We spent the rest of the afternoon snorkeling at a part of the reef just off the island and then when it got dark we just sat around and talked to the people who live there. There is sometimes electricity for a couple hours a day but most of the time it seems like people spend a lot more time relaxing and talking rather than watching TV and surfing the internet.
Here are two kids who had apparently gotten in the water and rolled around in the sand:
Everyone just seemed to enjoy living, talking to all their neighbors, going fishing for the day’s food, just going for a quick dip in the clear water whenever you feel like it. We were just sitting on the beach and half of the kids from the island went bodysurfing and a few of their moms came with them. I know this is probably idealistic and short sighted but it seemed like it was summer vacation all the time. We talked politics and soccer with the people for a couple of hours then called it a night but not after watching a rap battle and forced grinding/dancing content among the younger kids.
Some of the lobster traps they made to catch the clawless lobsters:
We woke up the next day, drank some coffee, did some more snorkeling and spent more time relaxing and just enjoying the island. The tour group for that day picked us up and we did a little more snorkeling before coming back to Chachahuate. We left with that tour group to go back and after a little seasick ride we made it back to Ceiba where we got some food and started to pack to come back. We went out to a restaurant to eat and made sure that they had the Panthers game on and unfortunately we got to see them lose along with a British and Canadian guy we’d met through the language school. We went back and finished packing in our kind of slummy hotel room, and tried to fall asleep despite being really excited about going back, two very loud mating geckos (it sounded like there were birds in our room), laying in an uncomfortable bed and being really hot. The next morning we woke up early to catch a bus and head back to the States and that’s where we are now. This is getting posted after the fact but the travels back went really smoothly and pretty soon you’ll get to read Melanie’s post about all the good times we had back in the States.

Campesinos in the Big City

2008-12-10T15:30:00.001-08:00

Here it is, December 8th, and it was 75 degrees or so this afternoon. There have been a few cold spells, but for the most part, the Honduran "winter" has been treating us well. We have to shut our window shutters sometimes, but we try to hold out as long as we can when it gets chilly because we then have to decide between relative warmth and light. When we went to the capital for Thanksgiving a couple weekends ago, we drove through areas where the houses looked different, not necessarily in size or color or maintenance—I couldn't put my finger on it for awhile—but I finally realized that they had glass windows. That's a sign of real luxury down here; it's a little bit like Little House on the Prairie sometimes, especially when the electricity goes out.

So, as I mentioned, we went to Tegucigalpa, the capital, for Thanksgiving. The school was originally going to put together a little farm weekend getaway for us, but the road was washed out (excuses, excuses…), so they basically paid for us to spend four days in the big city. Hopefully, we'll make it out to the farm another time, but we weren't too let down in the change of plans because the city meant restaurants, movies, and grocery stores. Tegucigalpa is about 150 miles away by road, which sounds like it should be a simple trip, but of course, that wouldn't have made for a noteworthy experience. We had 14 people in a van with all of our bags on top, and we left town around 6 am after taking a mototaxi down the mountain to catch the van. We left the paved road 20 minutes later (the highway right around Gracias seems to be one of the nicest stretches in the country), and must have stopped to yell out the window and ask for directions to the next town on our mental maps at least 15 times after that. The road washes out so often that most of the so-called "highway" looks like a permanent construction site. We came to several forks that looked equally attractive, but after trying one, we'd find out that it led to just a dirt hill or a deep pit. We made a stop about halfway for some comida tipica, and then we knew we were getting closer to the city because we started seeing fast food restaurants. The American fast food places here are pretty much the same as they are in the States, except that most of them are HUGE and all gussied up. Going out for fast food is a treat for most city people, and the prices are higher than they are at home, too. The food is the same, though, except for the addition of some bean/egg/tortilla/plantain concoction at each place. We did see a mariachi band hanging out with Ronald McDonald at one place, which, from what I remember, doesn't happen back home.

We spent a few hours just walking around near our hotel and sitting with some friends at a coffee shop chain (kind of like Honduran Starbucks). It felt so surreal to be in this place because it seemed like we were back in the States. The mall and chain restaurants are such a far cry from our rural landscape that it didn't seem possible that we could still be in the same country. That night, we went to the fanciest Thanksgiving dinner I've ever been to. One of the administrators from the rich Tegucigalpa Abundant Life school hosted, and most people were wearing suits and dresses. The house was very posh, and they had obviously hired a party planner to make elaborate centerpieces out of real fruit and leaves, decorate the tables with gold chargers and glittery leaf coasters, and do the lighting scheme and background music and all. The food was very authentic Thanksgiving, though, complete with marshmallow fruit salad, which I've always found a bit odd, but it just went to show that they had pulled out all the stops. Their house, and most Honduran houses, had such a great design that blended both indoor and outdoor space. Sometimes in houses here, you actually forget whether you are outside or inside, or you can't really decide even if you think about it because the distinction is not really important here. Lots of rooms in houses are covered but there aren't really any walls or there aren't any screens, or there could be a high wall around but no ceiling, or you're sitting in a garden but it's more or less just another room in the house. I wish that the weather back home made this kind of design possible, but it's just not practical when it gets down below freezing for months at a time. I've gotten so used to being connected to the outside, though, with our pane-less windows and the courtyard with the mountain view at school, and then our porch/carport and screen-only windows at home. It's going to be an adjustment going home in a couple of weeks and hiding out in the always-68 degree-houses except when going in between buildings and the car.

Anyway, to say that we enjoyed our meal would be like saying that pie is alright. All of us foreign teachers wolfed down the cheese and nuts immediately upon arrival (we don't get those things here in Gracias), and then shamelessly stuffed ourselves, in keeping with Thanksgiving tradition. We Americans do not take our holiday feasting lightly. After our meal, the driver that the school hired to take us around the city for the weekend brought us up to a high viewpoint for a look at the city at night. It's not beautiful during the day, and it's not like a big city with skyscrapers—it really feels more like just a really huge, sprawled-out town in the mountains. At night, though, the city is just a lot of lights spread out without pattern all over the valley and climbing up onto the surrounding mountains:

On our way back to the hotel, we passed by a train made out of some cars and other assorted vehicles with Christmas lights strung out connecting them together. It was called the "Kobs Express" and apparently takes its passengers to the nearest "Kobs" (an ice cream store chain). It was kind of a mixture of a kids' train at the mall, and a college campus "safe ride" kind of arrangement.

The next morning, some of the school administrators showed us around the organization's headquarters complex. We saw the big school there, the TV station, radio station, church, and they even took us to their hearing and eye clinic. We hadn't really known much about Abundant Life, the organization that bought the school we work at here, but it was good to open our eyes to all the good that they do in Honduras. They have a nightly AA meeting in their church facility, and nothing seems excessive or wasteful—they just make the most of what they have. In other areas of the country, they also have an orphanage and an elderly care facility. It's rare to have an organized Honduran group that is working successfully toward social improvement in their own country. They do not get many donations or volunteers from wealthier countries, and although some of their top administrators have a lot of money, most of them seem to have acquired their wealth before becoming involved with the organization, and it's admirable that they want to do some good with their money. While we were at the eye clinic, I mentioned that I needed a new pair of glasses, and they gave me a free eye exam and a pair of nice new glasses that cost about a quarter of what they would have back home. Ah, American health care. I was really impressed with the doctor, the optical shop, and not just the eye care but the whole organization in general.

We saw a movie that afternoon—The Hunting Game—it was alright, but the best part was just going to a movie theater and seeing a movie in English. Most of the movies they get here are action/adventure or scary ones in English with Spanish subtitles, or kids' movies that are dubbed in Spanish. After the movie, it felt as if we'd just walk out of the theater and out into the parking lot and get into our Honda and go home to our apartment in Beverly, but we snapped back to reality when we passed by the "Kobs Express" again and the big lighted up Jesus statue on a hill right above an even bigger Coca-Cola sign (like the Hollywood sign) that became our navigational landmark in the city:

The next day, we headed for some towns outside of the city, which were pretty, but more like our everyday surroundings here than anything else. I guess at this point, we aren't the usual tourists. We did buy our fair share of souvenirs, though, and we'll see how many make it home in one piece to give away for Christmas. We also went downtown, and walked through some historic areas where the buildings printed on the money here stand. It's an interesting view to be able to just see uninhabited mountains as a backdrop to a big city:

We also walked through some seedier areas, and turned around after we crossed a bridge that apparently led to a rougher neighborhood. The discrepancy in the distribution of wealth in the city is ridiculous, but I guess most cities are like that to some extent. About half the people that live in Tegucigalpa don't even have electricity or reliable plumbing, and then there are those like the house we went to for Thanksgiving that could easily be featured in some architectural or interior design magazines in the States. Here are some of the buildings right downtown, intermixed with shops and fancy government buildings:

We didn't do a lot more sightseeing in Tegucigalpa, but we did do a lot of eating. We had Japanese food, good pizza, subs, iced coffee, ice cream, and we went crazy at some grocery stores. We found pesto, cheese, plain yogurt, and even Ghirdelli brownie mix. We got a big fruitcake wrapped up in Christmas bows as a favor from the Thanksgiving dinner, and even though we quickly re-gifted it when we went to another little get-together in the city, we somehow ended up eating the whole thing by the end of the night. We all just sat up on this rooftop that looked out over the city and felt full and relaxed and strangely urban:

The trip home was much like the trip there, with scattered butterfly-in-the-stomach moments sitting in back when we'd hit the extra-deep, unexpected potholes. Aaron did get some nice shots out the window, though:

We got home in time for dinner, and spent the next couple days trying to recover and get back to normal at school. This last part has been challenging lately, with the long break approaching, and with our administration telling us to not focus on the curriculum, but rather to just work on the Christmas program. I wouldn't mind this so much except that this is not your typical school concert or play. We are having a group of drama students from the Tegucigalpa megachurch/school come and perform, while our kids act as background dancers. We don't get to make up the dances; this has been done by people in Tegucigalpa and put onto a DVD that we had to learn with our kids. This was even more of a letdown compared with what one of the other AL schools is doing for their program: spoof songs and dances (think Weird Al) with a Christmas theme. The teacher we talked to was supposed to have his class dress as fighter pilots and sing/dance to "Manger Zone" (Originally "Danger Zone"). It's ridiculous, obviously, but at least it's not supposed to be taken seriously, and it'd be fun! As for our extravaganza, each class has spent at least one class period every day since Thanksgiving working on their dance. My class is combined with the notoriously wild second graders (not that mine are angels on their own, either) for a total of 29 kids dancing to about an 8 minute song that I only know half the words for. Wrangling them for each practice session definitely takes both of us teachers, and most of the dance suggestions and critique on our part goes something like, "Stop running!" "No maracas right now!" "Stop touching him!" or "Hey, come back!"

We had a half day practice at the church auditorium in town where we'll be performing, and we have more tomorrow through Friday. Before we had the first practice day, we had a staff meeting to discuss what and where this would be happening. Someone naively asked for the address. There are no road names or numbers in town. I don't really know how people get their mail—we just get ours because there are so few Gringos around that we're easy to identify. Explaining the location of the church took at least 3 or 4 drawings on the board, about a dozen landmarks thrown out in reference, such as "the big market," "the big speaker store," and "the Garage of Flavor (Garaje del Sabor)." The discussion lasted a good 25 or 30 minutes, and after draining our attention spans, we were satisfied with the only directions for the practice given as "We will have snack rotations." A few of the highlights from practice day:

-Seeing what the kids brought from home for snacktime. One 45ish pound kid brought a hamburger, jello, candy, and a pint-and-a-half size peach nectar, which must have had at least 75 grams of sugar alone.

-One of the other foreign teachers was stung by a scorpion. This was obviously not a good highlight, but we did find out that unless you are allergic, it's just like getting a terrible bee sting that we hear burns like fire.

-Playing rock, paper, scissors, doing yoga moves with my kids, having my eyes covered and trying to guess whose grimy hands were on my face (usually I didn't know the kid's name because they were in another class), and watching Aaron's kids do tryouts for an air guitar solo that he's supposed to have in his dance. 4 hours of chaos and no one was hurt!

Here are some of Aaron's kids hamming it up off-stage during some of the plentiful down time:

Friday is the big performance night, so we'll have just 3 more days of class after that! The program is being broadcasted internationally on some Christian Spanish channel, so if you have a cable or satellite package with a lot of channels that you have never watched for more than 3 seconds, you might be able to see us at some point! Not sure about what the channel is called, but I'm guessing it will be aired sometime between 1 and 5 am on a weekday.

Besides the program, though, we've been able to do a few Christmasy things. We've taught our kids lots of Christmas carols, decorated our classrooms, done a little Christmas shopping, and been around lots of trees and lights in town. We went over to our friends' house for dinner the other night and even had some homemade eggnog. They make a really good milk-cinnamon-rice punch for Christmas here, too, which I hope to learn to make. Most of our neighbors are fattening up their chickens for their big meal in a couple of weeks, and they make tamales and go to church, but it's not as big of a commercial holiday as it is in the States. I don't think anyone wishes for snow, either. I have to say, I get a little satisfaction from listening to the Chicago and Boston NPR stations and hearing the weather there, and then going outside in my t-shirt for a walk down to the river or a nap in the hammock.

Lately, we've been to town more than usual. We had practice down there Friday last week, so we got our grocery shopping done a day early and hiked home under a bright moon. We did have a brush with danger on our way, though! We got to our friend/pulperia (tiny convenience store out of someone's house) owner, Jesus's house, and he stopped us for a chat. Some guys drove by in a pickup, and then stopped a few feet beyond the house. We weren't sure what was going on, but after a minute, Jesus asked us if we wanted to see a huge snake on the road where we had just walked. We went down to where the pickup was stopped, and there was indeed a HUGE snake lying in the road! It was probably there when we walked by, and we hadn't even seen it! The guys in the pickup had apparently stopped and thrown rocks at it to kill it because it's so deadly. I'm not sure why they didn't just run over it in the car, but I guess someone was a pretty good shot, and then they just pitched it over the rock wall and went on their way. Jesus told us that if we had been bitten, we "would have immediately died." Needless to say, we kept our eyes peeled the rest of the way home.

On Saturday, we took a day trip to La Campa, a picturesque little town just 10 miles away from Gracias. We'd been there once before, but some friends wanted to go, and we figured it'd be fun to go again, take a little hike, and get some more pottery. There's only one bus per day, and we didn't even know when it left, so we just walked along the road a little ways and got lucky within a couple of minutes when a missionary van picked us up and gave us a ride there. We walked along the river there and into the canyon a little ways once we got there. The rocks were carved out in such beautiful patterns, and they were all studded with fossils.

Here's a picture at the river:

We went to a little pottery museum to see how the Lenca people make the pottery, just out of a mixture of the dirt found in the area. They just fire them in a bonfire, and they've been making them the same way for generations. Some people use a wheel now, but for the most part, they haven't changed in their design or function. La Campa is so quiet that it's hard to tell if anyone is really there. We did manage to find the one restaurant in town, though, and it was one of the nicest settings we've eaten in. Like most of the comedors, we had to confirm with them that there was actually food available, to which the answer was, "yes, tacos," but the patio and the quiet breeze and views were beautiful.

Here's a view from a church overlooking the town:

And here's a man napping and sunning himself in a pile of beans...proof that there is life in La Campa, however quiet it may be.

We got lucky on the way home, too—we only waited for 5 minutes or so before a pickup stopped for us and brought us back to Gracias on the winding road around Celaque, the mountain that's our home.

One of the pictures taken from the jalon (pickup) ride...you can see one of the classy cow stickers in the window and and mountain ahead. It was NOT easy to take pictures in the back of a truck on a bumpy road! The driver was nice, though, and handed back some pixie stick sugar in a plastic orange for us to eat/have blown all over our faces in the wind.

We ended up staying in town late (haha, 8:30 is late for us here!), so a friend's parents who were in town lent us their truck to drive home for the night. It was so weird to ride in a truck with just us, and I hadn't worn a seatbelt since the plane ride in August!

Sunday we brought the car back, and continued our lucky transportation streak. A friend offered us her horses since they needed to go back to Villa Verde, where she keeps them and where we live. They weren't fast horses by any means, but it was a nice change of pace, and it's amazing how different the same scenery looks from just a few feet higher, when you can see over stone walls and don't have to watch the ruts and rocks under your feet. Our friend's dog followed us home, too, since she loves barking at the horses, and so it was nice to have a dog on loan for the night.

That just about brings everything up to date! If you've made it through the whole entry, congrats and thanks! Just one more week of classes, a few days at the beach, and then we'll be home! We'll be in Chicago until the 28th, then a quick stop in Indianapolis, down to Virginia for some time down there, and then up to Boston for a couple of days before we fly back here to start back up (after having a bug massacre to reclaim our house!). We miss you and think about our friends and family all the time. Hope you are enjoying everything that comes with the holidays, and maybe we'll see you soon!!

Free furniture and feedback

2008-11-25T16:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Three weekends...

2008-10-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

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?

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

2008-10-07T19:50:00.000-07:00

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.

My feet is my only carriage...

2008-10-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

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!

School and Copan

2008-09-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

We actually did have an internet connection over the weekend, but we were traveling and hadn’t written a blog entry to post, so again, here are two. I’ll write about school and save the travel adventures for Aaron this time. We were finally able to post some pictures so we might have gone a little overboard.

Last week was our first full week of school. Wow. I have never been more exhausted in every way than I am at the end of a school day here. The school is still really short-staffed, so we have unpredictable free periods because we often have to cover classes that should be taught by another teacher, like Music or Art (there is an Art teacher, but he can more often be found wandering campus or folding uniforms than actually showing up to teach Art). Apparently, we are getting a couple of new Ph
ilipino teachers next week, but I’m not sure what classes they’re going to take charge of. At least the administrators are getting friendlier, and I have a good 10 minutes of time interacting with them in the office each day as I fill out my photocopy requests (it’s very important to have documentation of all of this, apparently). Luckily, this week was a short one because Monday was Independence Day and Tuesday was Teacher’s Day (glad they figured the best way to celebrate that was to have it off!). Tomorrow we’re supposed to have a little teachers’ meeting/party after school, so we’ll see what that holds.

The overabundance of energy that elementary schoolers have seems to be doubled here. Even compared to the heavy-on-the-ADHD mixture of kids that we taught at Landmark, these kids seem really hyperactive. I think a lot of that probably comes from the language difference…they can’t understand our instructions or grasp the guidelines of the classroom in general or those of individual activities, so they tend to just tune out what I am saying. Instead, they are more likely to talk to their friend, interrupt class to put a sticker on me, tell me (in Spanish, of course) that “so-and-so won’t let me use the glue” when we aren’t doing anything where glue would be remotely useful, or make airplanes out of rulers and pens and fly them around a bit. Most of their behavior problems are pretty harmless, but with every one of my 17 students acting this way 90% of the time, that’s a lot of chaos in one classroom for 7.5 hrs a day.
Here is a picture of Melanie's classroom door, pretty darn nice if you ask me.

That said, the kids are a lot more excited about school than the older students we’re used to, as Aaron said in the last entry. They love games and competition, and I don’t have to worry that lessons I plan will be too cheesy, lame, or babyish; the biggest danger is being too complicated to explain in English/limited Spanish, or being something that takes more time than their attention spans will allow. On one worksheet, I guess it wasn’t clear that “Word Bank” was a label and not one of the prepositions they could use to fill in the blanks, so two students wrote “the apple is Word Bank the table” as one of their sentences, choosing “Word Bank” instead of the simple, boring, “on”. They LOVE singing, and the song they seem to like best is one that they sing in devotional time in the morning with all of the other K-4th grade kids. The song is called (I’m assuming) “Jesus’s Love is Bubbling Over,” but the teacher who leads devotional sings it as “Jesus’s Love is Bumbling Over,” so that’s how all the kids know it. I’m pretty sure that’s not the meaning they’re going for, but the kids don’t know what “bubbling” or “bumbling” means anyway, so nobody’s going to step in and correct them at this point. It’s funny to hear some of the younger classes singing it as a way of ignoring their teachers…it’s kind of the rebel cry at school.

Progress has been slow, but my kids are getting slightly better at staying in their seats, telling me what day it is, how they feel, lining up at the door, and telling time (Math is the easiest subject to teach here because it requires the least amount of verbal communication). Science is the hardest because it’s nearly impossible to communicate concepts without relying on language. In my textbook, I’m supposed to be covering the 5 senses right now, and learning words like “cilia” and “retina,” “projected image” and “vibration”—my kids don’t even know what an eye or ear is, so we’re just sticking to those basics for now.

I think one of the reasons that kids have so much trouble working with structure here is that there really aren’t a whole lot of rules built into the culture here, or at least, not ones that we can recognize yet. For example, there are no obvious or observed driving laws…you can pass anyone anytime and drive at any speed, stop whenever you like, fit as many people in the back of your pickup truck as possible (and sure, they can stand up while in there and moving 60 mph, why not?), pick up hitchhikers, let their 8 year old kids drive…anything goes. In like manner, parents can stop by your classroom whenever they like, just to talk, tell you that their child needs to sit in front, ask you a question about the uniforms…all while class is going on and all of your third graders are about to lose it and start ripping into their snacks or climbing on the bars of the windows. The one hard and fast rule we have learned is that you can’t swim in the river in the National Park because it is the source of water for Gracias down below. We learned this the hard way one day when we got yelled at for being up there and looking like we just went swimming (which we had). We can swim by our house, though, and down near the school, so that’s a relief.

During the long week last week, I think every one of the foreign teachers and most of the Honduran teachers all felt close to throwing in the towel at some point and just leaving the job altogether. It’s a huge challenge that we’re facing, but every one of us has our own particular concerns based on our classes and life situation. Aaron and I are lucky that we have at least some teaching experience, and that we have each other, and we love our house and the setting here. It’s good that Aaron got a class that speaks a little English, and although we didn’t know the details about what we were getting into this year, we knew it would be tough but ultimately rewarding. We’re keeping our fingers crossed on that it will be rewarding, but for now, we’re trying to stay positive for us and the other teachers, especially the younger foreign ones. I just wish we had more support to give during the day, but for now, we’re barely surviving each day ourselves! This week has been a little better (maybe just because it’s short), so I think as we get through more and more days, our tolerance for chaos and miscommunication will meet up with some manifestation of the structure we’ve been trying to establish, and we’ll find our stride at school.

I could go on about school quite a while, but we’ve got lots more weeks of blogs to post, anyway, so I’m sure it’ll all come out eventually. Aaron’s going to write about the weekend of travel we had…it was good to get out on a little adventure…and the next long weekend is coming up in just a couple of weeks!

Well as Melanie said last week was a verrry long and trying week at school and everyone barely made it to the weekend. Having a four day weekend seemed like it might be the perfect recipe to restore the patience and energy of some frazzled teachers. By chance it turns out that all seven of the foreign teachers ended up going to the same place. I say it was chance but there weren’t really that many choices of places to go to spend four days. Travelling anywhere takes an extremely long time here due to the terrain and nature of the bus system (more to come on that later) so there are really only a couple of places in our range for a four day weekend. Our destination this past weekend was Copan Ruins, in the northwest corner of Honduras on the border with Guatemala. Copan Ruins is probably the most popular tourist destination in the country. It is only 50 miles away from where we live as the quetzal flies but by land it is a little over a hundred miles away. Still you would think hmm 100 miles, maybe 2 hours, but everyone we had talked to said it would take about 4 hours. If only we had been so lucky.
We left our house around 8 in the morning on Saturday hoping to catch a bus around 8:45. We tried riding our bikes down to town but its pretty rough and my bike had a flat tire so we didn’t make it too far. We left the bikes at Leah and Aren’s house which is right next to school. They are two other foreign teachers from Michigan who got married a week before they came to Honduras. Leah teaches second grade and Aren teaches fifth grade. Anyway, so we walked down the mountain with them and our laundry and made it into town a little after 9. We ran a couple errands watched a little bit of a parade full of kids and then went to the bus station because supposedly there was a “direct” bus at 9:50. Well, the bus didn’t end up leaving around 10:30 and it wasn’t direct by any means. Here buses sort of have scheduled departure times, but those take a back seat to how many people are on the bus. A bus won’t leave until it is at least half full, so even if it is 15 minutes past when it was supposed to leave it will still wait until it has enough people. Now it is only 30 miles from Gracias to Santa Rosa but it takes an hour and a half. So why does it take the bus an hour and a half to go 30 miles you may ask? First of all the roads are extremely curvy and hilly. Even though the old school buses are supped up with tractor trailer engines, it is hard to carry a load up a 20% grade and a 40 degree turn. The main reason though is that the bus stops ALL the time. Rarely does the bus go more than 2-3 minutes without stopping to either pick someone up or drop them off. When there is actually a flattish straightish stretch though the bus goes about 80 miles an hour. So when you average together bat out of hell speeds, mountain roads, and forty stops, you get a speed of about 20 miles an hour.
So we finally made it to Santa Rosa around 11:45. We needed to stop there to get money from the ATM (there is no ATM in Gracias for some strange reason), so I got in line behind four other people to use it. I was getting antsy because the first person in line took about ten minutes, I thought they were just doing lots of transactions but it turns out the ATM wasn’t working that well. They finally finished and the next people moved up and then all of a sudden the machine just turned off. I thought “That’s too bad, but its okay I’ll just go into the bank next door and get my travelers checks cashed. I walked to the bank and got the door closed and locked in my face. This was a bad thing, I checked the time and there was still 10 minutes until the bank was supposed to close, but the guard just decided to close up early. I’ll now tell you why this was a bad thing. We had no money between the four of us. We didn’t have enough money to go on to the next stop or even enough money to get back to Gracias. You would probably say, “Oh, Aaron, that’s no big deal just go to another bank.” Well apparently every single bank closes at 12:00 on Saturday morning for some reason. We were pretty much in desperation mode now, so Leah and I hailed a cab with the remaining dollar we had and have them drive around town looking for another ATM or bank that was open. We went by two closed banks and finally found an ATM that was open, so the quicksand situation we were in ended all of a sudden. Its seems like money has a little stronger hold on you here, yes we have less of it, but that’s not the problem. It is just that it is so hard to get. We can’t get any money during the week because the only time the bank is open is while we are in school and when you go on Saturday the line is an hour and a half or two hours. I never thought that direct deposit would be a pain but I really wish we got our stipend in cash. Anyway, enough about money.
So we finally got out of Santa Rosa with money and took a bus to our next stop, La Entrada. As soon as we stepped off the bus we realized how lucky we are to live where we do. I would describe La Entrada as 90 degrees, dusty, and loud, all of which are fitting as it is a highway crossroads town. We got there and realized that we had 40 minutes until the next bus to Copan Ruins so we set off in search of a bathroom. No such luck. We found a little food and I was searching for a suitable building to relieve myself against (per Honduran culture) but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, but I’m sure it will be only a matter of time. We made our way back to the bus station and found our sweet new ride, aka an old school bus. This one was supposed to be a little step up with coach seats instead of school bus seats, but unfortunately the seats weren’t bolted down correctly and were all leaning in at a significant angle, so we spent the next two and a half hours feeling like we were constantly going around a really sharp turn. We went in and out of rain for the last leg and it was clear that it rained really hard before we got there as evidenced by the mudslides and places where the road was washed out. It was really touch and go as to if we would actually make it to Copan because there was only about 6 inches of road on each side of the bus that hadn’t washed into the river yet. As we were going slowly over one particularly treacherous part we watched as a 40 ft tall tree floated past us down the river, there have been few times in my life when a tree has moved faster than me in a motor vehicle.
So we finally made it Copan around 4:30 and made it to our hostel in the rain. It was nice finally being settled after a long long day of traveling. I won’t get into too much detail about the hostel except that it was really nice, an old colonial home that they renovated with lots of nice tile and artsy touches. After drying off and unpacking we met all of the other teachers for dinner at one of the foreigner restaurants and had a nice big dinner of thai curry and potato lasagna, two things I never thought my tastebuds would touch while we were here. It was also hearing everyones’ stories about the bus trip, some people getting hit on by 80 year olds and others who had to change seats because their window was broken on the seat. We did a little bit of people watching in the plaza after dinner and called it a night.

The Ruins of Copan

Sunday morning we got up pretty early and headed out to the ruins. Its about a km outside of town and there was this really nice stone sidewalk that was in the shade the entire time. We got to the ruins and found out that the entrance fee was $15 for foreigners and for Hondurans it was $2.50. $15 seem like a fair price in the States but here that is four days working at a decent wage here and its not like we have tons of money. We asked the cashier if there were any discounts for teachers or volunteers and she responded sarcastically that there were no discounts for teachers or volunteers or men or women or Catholics. We shelled out the dough and headed to the entrance. The ruins are amazing for several reasons one of which is the setting. The ruins cover several hundred acres of what used to be a large Mayan city with 6000 or so inhabitants and 30,000 people in the “metropolitan area.”
When you enter the archaelogical park you are completely enveloped by ancient towering trees, trees that make you think they are going to lift up their roots and start walking and talking like the Ents.

One of the Ents of Copan

So you’re walking along staring up at the trees and airbrushed looking macaws that hang around and then you walk out through an opening into a grassy (think golf course grass) olden plaza full of stone pyramids and altars and statues.

Its pretty overwhelming, I have never seen such a large flat place in Honduras, much less one with grass. Mainly its overwhelming because there is so much to see. Every rock there is full of history and information and there are millions of stones placed in hundreds of structures. I’ll give you a brief little history of how the ruins came to be one of the biggest tourist draws in all of Honduras.
In the late 1820s- early 1830’s Franklin Pierce funded several exploratory expeditions through Central and South America. One of the expeditioners when traveling through Western Honduras heard of some ruins from a local farmer. The farmer took him to them and he was impressed, bought them from the farmer for $50 and then wrote a book about his travels that became one of the bestsellers of the 19th century. He didn’t really do any official archeology but in the 1880’s some actual archeologists inspired by the book came to Honduras and started large scale excavations and reconstructions. Its hard to imagine how much work this was. When you go to the ruins today, it is very pristine. Most of the structures are intact, but apparently in the 1800’s there really wasn’t all that much to look at, plus it was in the middle of a jungle. So the archeologists had to clear the jungle, excavate this huge site, try to figure out who, when, and what it was, and then reconstruct some of the structures. Luckily for the archeologists the Mayans left them a little help. Instead of knocking demolishing buildings when they wanted to build something new they simply built on top of the existing structure. This left a perfect linear record of what was built when and allowed easily correlation between buildings, rulers and times. On lots of the stones there are carved pictures that the archeologists thought were a language. Finally they figured out that they were actually pictures that represented events and they uncovered a huge staircase (probably 75 ft tall) that told the entire history of the Copan Mayan dynasty from 450-950AD.

Some of the carvings on the stones

The residential district of Copan

It was also really interesting that out of the 200 or so structures there were probably only 10 that you couldn’t walk on. Although it felt kind of wrong to be tramping all over the ruins it was a pretty unique perspective from atop some of the pyramids.

That is Melanie pretending to eat what we called the "Hamburger." Its interesting to note that the hamburger is where they put the organs of those who were sacrificed to the Gods (you can see the path for the blood to run down.

After being saturated with sights and information we headed back to town grabbed some lunch on the street and then walked out of town to a bird park called Macaw Mountain. They have 200 or so birds that are all rescued birds and there was a nice tour with lots of information about the different species but the best part by far was getting to have all of the macaws and parrots crawl all over you.

A little cheesy yes, but still cool

School's in session!

2008-09-06T15:08:00.001-07:00

Sorry we missed our post last week, we didn't make it to town this week and our carrier pigeons didn't work out. So you get two posts now. Enjoy!

P.S. We can't post pictures this week because the internet is being too slow...we've tried two days in a row now and no luck...sorry! We'll have lots of pictures to share when we're back for Christmas!

Part I (last week by Melanie)

This entry is a little late, but we didn’t go to town this week, so here it is now…I’ll mainly talk about last week, and then Aaron will write about this week. So, last week we had a full week of work days even though there were no students. We spent our days amongst the construction crew and dust and decorated our classrooms, planned a little bit, etc. The decorating took all of an hour or two per classroom, and actually, I couldn’t even get into my classroom until Friday because the workers were camping out in my room and the key mysteriously went missing every day before the administrators showed up and worked their magic to extract the key from whomever’s pocket it was being hidden. I spent a whole 2/3 of the first day just decorating my door, since that was about all I had to do at that point. We are supposed to use a fairly set curriculum, but we aren’t getting our books for another week or two, and we didn’t have a printer or copy machine, so besides thinking of activities to do on the board or orally, it was pretty close to impossible to plan much. Many “work” hours were spent playing Scrabble, walking down to the river, getting to know the other teachers, and learning useful tidbits such as:

~If someone asks you if you’d like coffee, specify that you want it amargo (bitter), or you will get more sugar in it than a can of Coke. By the way, all of the sugar here is “in the raw”…big brown-ish crystals. It’s pretty good…the honey is really good, though.

~They don’t seem to care what you are doing while you are at work, but just that you are there for the expected hours. Some teachers missed their ride because they didn’t know where the meeting spot was, and were instructed to set their watches ahead 10 minutes. Not a good way to start the week.

~Along the same lines, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to be checking in on our actual teaching style, lessons, etc. So long as we have a plant on our desk for parents’ night, stay in dress code, and don’t let our kids touch the walls when they line up in the morning, I guess they assume we can handle the whole teaching part. We’ll see. I’m really glad that we’ve both taught before because this would be an overwhelming place to learn.

~The cleaning staff mops constantly…they mopped my room 4 times in one day, even if no one had been in there in between moppings.

~Baking at home here is rare for most people…we get a lot more wows by bringing banana bread to school than by anything professional that we do there.

~If you get invited to a social at the hot springs (which are very nice, and very fancy by Honduran standards), don’t assume that other people besides the foreigners and children will actually get in the hot springs. They will bring delicious food, though, and you will be excused from being wet and towel-clad while you eat it because you are a foreigner and don’t know what’s what.

~The house that stands empty next to ours used to be rented out to a peace corps volunteer, but then one night a bolo (drunk guy) threatened to kill her dog with a machete because it was barking. She complained to the Peace Corps, and they moved her. That seals the deal on NOT getting any pets while we’re here.

~We can get butter at a person’s house near the school, but we couldn’t find it anywhere else in town. There are a lot of situations like this…it’s kind of like the opposite of Wal-Mart and big superstores down here. Instead of one-stop shopping, you almost have to make as many stops as the number of items you are looking for. Different stands in the market sell different items…there’s the spice places, the produce places, the tortilla ladies, the bread people, tamale people, cornbread people, bean people, grain people, medicine people, rope people, horse accessories people, shoe people, bowl people, woven mat people…the list goes on. And then there’s tons that you can’t get in the market because it’s a specialty item sold in just one store or just one person’s unmarked house. For example, on Saturday, we went looking for a hammock. Pretty much everyone has one, so we figured it must not be too hard to find them. We looked all over town, asked several people, and came up with nothing. We finally found out from someone that the hammocks are made and sold at the prison, which is about a 2 hour hike or so through the mountain roads (again, unmarked). So I guess everyone knows to get their hammocks at this prison…the most natural thing in the world, right? I go back and forth between thinking these little searches and errands in town are charming and just being frustrated at the inefficiency.

So Saturday we went into town for a hammock search as well as some wiffle ball! We played with a bunch of other Gringos up by the famous castle in town. Everywhere we go here is a beautiful view…it’s amazing. Anyway, we had our pictures taken there by some photographers working on a tourism project, so maybe we’ll show up in some brochure somewhere. After wiffle ball, we got some Chinese food at the one restaurant in town that doesn’t serve platos tipicos (typical dishes), and went back to some friends’ house to hang out. We spent the night down there because we didn’t want to walk back 5 miles in the dark, and then the next morning we went to Santa Rosa, a bigger town that you get to by a 1.5 hour bus ride. The way there was fine, we got some good grocery shopping in and even found some cheese (although we hear that all the cheeses that aren’t Honduran cheese just taste like Swiss). We bought a ton of stuff, and then loaded back on the bus. We thought we were the last ones on the bus, since we took the last seats (and by seats, I mean 3 to a bench made for 2, and 2 to a seat made for 1. No, we were NOT last…there were at least 75 people on that old school bus by the time we got on the main road back to Gracias. There were people sitting on sacks in the aisles, and we would occasionally pull over to let more people pile in the back door and squeeze into the standing room in the aisle. Whew, we were glad to get back, but then we still had to talk a taxi driver into letting us cram our stuff into his little go-kart type of vehicle and take us up the rough dirt road back to our house. Lots of taxi drivers refuse to even go up here, so it’s really hard to find one that will do that and put up with all of our stuff and weight, too. Getting back home in the taxi was an adventure in itself, with some close calls for breakdowns, stalls, a downpour (there are no sides to the taxis), and the taxi driver’s girlfriend deciding to come along for the ride (apparently he must be a great guy because he is worth sitting next to two wet, smelly Gringos and their obscene amount of bags, crates, a small windshield, metal wire, and other items they bought or inherited from their friends in town.)

So that brings us through the weekend (LAST weekend). This week has been a lot busier at school, which is mainly why we haven’t been to town all week. We had all sorts of preparation for parents’ night on Tuesday, and Monday was just spent planning, having various meetings, and having a praise session led by one of the Evangelical administrators. It will be interesting to see what the religious atmosphere of the school really develops into this year, since 9 out of the 10 teachers at the school have different personal philosophies and beliefs than the Abundant Life organization, which runs the school. Actually, this is going to get a little personal, but during this praise session at the beginning of the week, I had kind of a shift in perspective. The situation itself was not going to change, so I realized I had to approach this year and this discrepancy in philosophy with new eyes. We came here to immerse ourselves in a different culture, and that’s exactly what we have found ourselves in. I have been hurt by Evangelical notions (or at least, some individuals’ interpretations of these notions) in the past, but I should not feel personally attacked by anyone’s religious views. No religion is established for the purpose of harm, and they each have value and something worth learning. The people in this organization do a lot of good, and seem like they genuinely believe in their cause and their work. For them, the Bible is at the center of their lives. For others in the world, it may be another religious text or traditions and stories passed down to them. If I were immersed in any of these other religions, I would try to learn from it while keeping my own beliefs intact, and there is no reason this situation should be different. For most of the children at this school, their families have chosen to enroll them in this Christian school, knowing that they will be praying in school and abiding by certain rules. This is not a public school, and this is not being forced on anyone (except maybe the teachers!). So, we’re here in the Honduran culture, but we’re also working within this school’s culture. We don’t have to fully share in the beliefs of either, but we are here with open minds and we are willing to experience both. I also gave some consideration to the idea of raising children in a particular religion, and I think that it’s beneficial in the way that it’s beneficial to learn a language. If you don’t ever learn a language as a child, it’s impossible to ever fully acquire language, and learning a second one is out of the question. In a similar way, by growing up under some religion, ANY religion (and a child really can’t use reasoning and logic to choose his or her religious beliefs), he learns about faith and God and what worship is, and then as he matures, he can apply these learned principles to his own evolving beliefs, and might even be able to understand, respect, and accept other people for their ideas. Anyway, these rambly thoughts have just been forming and incubating in my mind recently, and have helped me come to terms with my role as a teacher here and the extent to which I can support and participate in the school’s philosophy.

Enough deep thoughts for now…tomorrow is Friday and it’s time for another weekend! P.S. Remember to send Aaron an email for his birthday on Sunday (the 7th)!! Next weekend, we have a couple extra days off, so we’re planning on doing our first weekend trip then. Hope those at Landmark and other teachers/students are getting off to a good start with their year! Thinking of you and wishing you well!

Part 2 (Aaron, this week)

So we got our first week of school in the books, we’ll call it a week anyway even though there were only three days of school. Monday was just another workday but it was supposed to be formal. We were told to be in our dress code and to be there at 7:20 (instead of 8). So we followed both of those edicts and it turns out neither were true. We showed up at 7:20 and the place was dead and when people did show up they were in jeans and t-shirts. Oh well, living up here on the mountain we are pretty out of the loop you might say.
Tuesday was a big day though as it was orientation night with all the parents coming to see what was actually going on at this new school they’re sending their kids to. The day was spent with lots of last minute leveling of decorations and translating letters into Spanish and such. The orientation was supposed to start at 4:30 for the younger grades, but in Honduras people usually pay about as much attention to schedules as they do to the drunks passed out on the sidewalk. The school though is very strict as far as schedules go though and there weren’t many parents at all when it started. 1st grade which has 21 only had 4 parents at 4:30 but they started and other parents trickled in over the next hour, annoyed that it had already started and the people running the orientation annoyed that people came late. It was really nice meeting the parents though, most didn’t really talk to us that much because we spoke in English and most of the questions were directed to the translator (one of the school administrators) but several parents came up afterwards with concerns about their kid talking too much, needing to be in the front, being shy, etc…
It is an interesting school community though. Whereas Landmark was families that are extremely wealthy and those from the upper middle class the school here is the richest families in the area and some of the poorest with about 30% of the student population made up of scholarship students.
After the really long day they had some snacks for us that were left over from the preschool and kindergarten orientation. They were trying to convince the parents to buy these snacks for their kids which looked liked kids snacks from the Ritz Carlton. It was bologna and cheese pieces on toothpicks arranged like a star, fruit salad in special designs, Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes.
Wednesday morning we got to school did a quick change (we can’t really wear our school clothes to school because they would get really dirty on the walk) and got ready for the kids to come. I think all the teachers were anxious and nervous just wondering what their class would be like. So the kids showed up excited to be back in school and when the bell rang they exploded into the classroom. It turns out that my class, the 4th grade is one of the better grades in the elementary school, as far as English and behavior go. Melanie’s class knows pretty much zero English but is a good group of kids while several of the younger grade have no English and are full of behavior challenges. It’s a tough situation because we are supposed to speak only in English and when you try to manage a classroom full of kids who don’t speak English they pay no attention to you. Melanie and I both feel so lucky to have had classroom experience, its hard for us to imagine doing this without any but for the other foreign teachers this is their first time teaching and they are pushing through but it is extremely trying. There were lots of frazzled psyches by the end of the week.
We both have our elementary grade that we teach and then we also teach a subject to the 7th and 8th graders and it is such a change going between, especially the level of English that you can use. In my class the kids are pretty good at understanding directions and concepts but when I am explaining any information it has to be watered down to about a 500 word English vocabulary. Then I walk into the 8th grade class and I really have to change my mindset to speak at my normal level. The first day was pretty overwhelming, just energy wise and we all were happy when 12:00 came and we could breathe out. This week we got out at 12:00 everyday because the cafeteria isn’t finished yet but next week we go until 3:00 and that will present an entirely new set of challenges.
I won’t go into such detail with the other two school days but I’ll just give some random thoughts from the first week:
- What a contrast there is between the energy of high schoolers and elementary school students. I know its probably just a honeymoon phase right now but the kids are so excited about learning and going crazy wanting to show you their work. With high schoolers after trying a creative lesson it was usually just “Ugh, why do we have to do this.”
- Country Roads has universal appeal. In Japan it was a big hit and apparently it is here as well. The music teacher at school isn’t getting here for another couple of weeks so I tried it out with my students, changing a couple of the words to make it specific to here and I think they are now John Denver fans.
- Some of the rules at school will never stick. We had a meeting yesterday and apparently it is a rule that students can’t go to the bathroom at all during class. They have a recess at 9:40 and lunch at 11:40 but that leaves 6 and a half hours where they aren’t supposed to use the bathroom. I know I can’t hold it that long.
- Never take a photocopier for granted. It was great news when we learned that the school was going to have a photocopier, but I never thought it would be such a pain. We aren’t allowed to use it. When we want something copied we have to submit a request at least one day in advance and hope that they follow our instructions on the request form. It is so frustrating not being able to go into the office and copy what we want.

Getting Settled

2008-08-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of the road in front of our house.

Here is our nice blue house, soon to be named "Cielito Lindo" a la the Beverly restaurant.

Just a little note before we get started. We’re going to try and be as candid as possible in our writing to really let you know what is going on with us. We don’t want to offend anyone with what we write, so please understand this is just what we think. This especially applies to our thoughts on the school.

Alright, we’ve been in Gracias for 10 days now, and we’re adjusting to life here pretty well so far. We finally moved into our house 2 days ago, after a good amount of run-around with various people in charge of our housing. We got the go-ahead to move in last Wednesday, so we brought all of our stuff up via a very bumpy pickup truck ride up the dirt/rock road, only to find that we had no water here. So, we brought everything back down to the hotel for a few more nights. I guess the hotel owner finally lit a fire under the seats of the school administrators to get us out of our hotel and into our house, because we got to come back and move in on Friday. During those two days, the school sent some people in to paint the interior, so now it’s just blue on the outside, and white on the inside. We weren’t thrilled with the white because compounded with the lack of furniture, we’re living a pretty ascetic lifestyle up here on the mountain. Luckily, accumulating stuff is one of our specialties, so I’m sure we’ll make the house our own in no time.

Actually, we’ve already gotten a table from the school, some chairs, and Aaron put up some shelves in the kitchen and bathroom today with just boards and rope. If you’re thinking of writing to us at any time, we’d love to have any kind of pictures, magazine clippings, postcards, cards…anything colorful that we can stick on the wall! Oh, and along those lines, our address here is:

(my name and/or Aaron’s)
Guancascos
Gracias, Lempira
Honduras

Honestly, that’s it! No zipcode or anything, and since there are no road names or house numbers here, they just send all the mail addressed to Gringos to the same hotel, and we pick it up there. Everyone assures us that their mail (packages, too) arrives there pretty reliably.

Yesterday we went into town to pick up some things…it’s easy to get into town because it’s all downhill and sometimes we get a ride in a pickup going that way (we’re learning how to hold onto the sides to keep from bouncing around in there like popcorn). On the way back, though, we either have to walk uphill for 4 miles, or get a motortaxi, which takes about half an hour or more to go the 4 miles because of the rough road. We’re hoping to make it into town at least once during the week, and on weekends. Favorite stores so far: place without a name that is packed full of jars of every kind of fruit, vegetable, pickled stuff, jam, and fruit wine, with a couple freezers full of homemade popsicles in back (just pureed fruit in frozen dixie cups with sticks…sooo good), Jugos Y Mas—place that makes fresh juice, smoothies (called licuados here), and this bread place owned by this tiny lady that makes fresh wheat breads and sells yogurt (supposedly…we have missed it every time we’ve gone). There is a market with all sorts of odds and ends, and tons of minimarkets, stores that sell just plastic items like tupperware and dustpans, hardware stores, and little businesses that people run out of their houses.

Today we just spent some time at our house, cleaning up, walking up into the park and swimming in the river, and I had a 2-3 hour laundry adventure outside at our pila, which is a big cement tub with a built-in kind of washboard. Washing clothes here is a pretty big ordeal…soaking overnight, 2 kinds of detergent, scrubbing on the washboard, rinsing in a bucket and with the hose, wringing everything out, and then hanging it up. Well, I guess we won’t be washing things too often. And I won’t take washing machines for granted when we get back!

Technically we also started work last week. Thursday and Friday there was a kind of orientation for all of the teachers that are here so far (5 Americans and 2 Hondurans.) Normally it would just be for the foreign teachers but the school has changed ownership/management in the past month so this is a pretty big change and I’ll try to give you a brief background. So 7 years ago a Dutch woman named Frony (also owns the hotel we’d been staying at) started a bilingual school in Gracias to serve the local population with both paying and scholarship students. Over time the school grew and she secured money from a Dutch foundation to build a bigger school in Villa Verde, up the mountain from town. Besides being bilingual Frony instilled the school with an ecological mission, hoping to establish a connection between the students and their environment. In short the school grew a lot, parents wanted lots of different things, the foreign teachers didn’t always live up to expectations and there was a principal who didn’t get along with anyone. This all was very stressful for Frony and after an especially rough year last year she decided to sell the school. She sold the school to a large Honduran organization call Vida Abundante (Abundant Life) which is based as a huge church in Tegucigalpa but has many different service branches including 6 Christian schools.

We found out that the school was changing hands about a week before we were coming down. It definitely made us a little apprehensive and changed things for us and I’ll try to explain how it has affected us by giving some pros and cons of the change.

Pros:
1. Abundant Life is a large extremely organized organization that does a lot of good. They have started and support orphanages and medical clinics in some of the poorest areas of Honduras, all done for Hondurans by Hondurans.
2. In a country where timelines and schedules don’t really exist, they can make things happen quickly. The school officially changed hands two weeks ago and they have already completed some large construction projects finished and have found housing for all of the foreign teachers.
3. The structure of the school will be very helpful for a lot of the children. It sounds like last year consistency and structure were some of the big problems at the school with lots of discipline problems and no real set curriculum. With foreign teachers changing every year no one ever knew what the students had been taught and what they should be taught. The curriculum is very set and will give new teachers a lot of guidance.

Cons:
1. Its not what we signed up for. After teaching at Landmark we both have gotten really good at coming up with curriculum out of thin air. We were both looking forward to the more relaxed atmosphere and learning how to teach younger kids. Also the religious focus of the school trumps the ecological mission. The fact that the school was not religious before is one of the major reasons we chose it. Melanie and I have both had some negative experiences with evangelical Christianity and so it is difficult for us to work for this type of organization. It isn’t an ideal situation for either group involved, us not being what they want in Christian teachers and it not being the school we signed up for, but we both want to make it work and I think it will.
2. The school is extremely strict. Teachers and students have to wear full uniforms (blazer, slacks and tie for me) and students have to stand up in the classroom to talk. Its not that it is totally bad, but it is not really part of either of our educational philosophies.
Here are a couple of the things that students can get demerits for:
a. Use of fingernail polish or makeup
b. Being a nuisance
c. Inadequate posture
d. Having a challenging attitude towards the established order.
I don’t think the demerit system will come into play that much with the elementary kids but I sure know that I would have gotten a lot of demerits in high school.
3. A huge difference in philosophy. The whole religious differences issue bleeds over into a lot of other beliefs that contradict each other, from evolution to homosexuality to how history is recorded. The school uses a Christian curriculum called Abeka books which looks very well organized but which contradicts many of the things that are part of who we are and what we believe. It is going to be difficult to reconcile the differences between what we believe and what the curriculum says we should teach. The curriculum already has daily lesson plans for every subject for the entire year so most of our actual planning time will be coming up with a compromise for some of the more controversial material. Luckily, we are mainly teaching 3rd grade (Melanie) and 4th grade (Aaron), so the controversial issues probably won’t arise in the curriculum as much as they would in higher grade levels, since we’re pretty much just covering plants and animals and the water cycle in science class this year.

All that being said we’re both really looking forward to the school year and the challenges it holds. Working with younger students is going to be a nice change of pace and the school is in an absolutely breathtaking setting (when construction finishes up we’ll post some pictures.)

This week we have to be at school, I guess sort of like teacher workdays. It seems to be the common syndrome of there is too much to do and there is nothing to do all at once. Mostly what we’re doing right now is decorating our doors and porusing the curriculum. Apparently the textbooks aren’t going to arrive for a couple of weeks so that will give us a welcome opportunity to improvise.

We are both looking for suggestions so anyone who has some favorite books from 3-4th grade please send them our way.

Here we are

2008-08-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

So I bet you’re wondering why two totally non-dorky people would title their blog “Four Eyes on the Mountain”. Although Melanie does need glasses rarely when its too dirty for her to put her contacts in you can mark off the association with horn-rimmed glasses. So here are the reasons:

1. Most blogs seem to be one person’s take on things and just by reading ours you’ll be able to get some insight from both of us. We’re hoping to post at least once a week, alternating who gets to be the author.
2. The thing we’ll be looking at the most here is The Mountain (Celaque). Our house is right at the base of the tallest mountain in Honduras. Its looks majestic and wild and I think it will always be a reference for us as we write about what goes on in rural Honduras.
3. Its really hard to come up with a name for a blog, especially with two people deciding.

Well, here we are…entry number one (with a little info from both of us interspersed). We made it down here after a long journey from Chicago, leaving my parents’ house there at 3 am (thank you to my mom for sacrificing a night of sleep) and after 2 flights and a bus ride, arriving at 7 pm here. The trip was pretty smooth over all, with no lost bags or missed connections, but I can’t say it wasn’t without note. When we were checking bags in Chicago we made sure to have our two checked bags under 50 pounds so we wouldn’t have to pay the surcharge. Our strategy for making this happen was to put all of our really heavy stuff into our carry on bags that never seem to get weighed. Whenever we walked around we acted like “Wow, these are so light!” when in reality they weighed 50-60 pounds. The airline person snagged Melanie’s carry on though and it weighed 47 pounds. He told us we needed to take some weight out, so we went to a lot of trouble finding heavy little things to take out, and reweighed it until it was 40 lbs. Then when were out of his sight, we put it all back in. A very ineffective system, and it doesn’t seem like it would matter whether the bag or you is 8 pounds heavier. It is also a very good thing that we didn’t lose any bags, as the baggage office at the airport in Honduras is only open on Tuesdays and we arrived on a Thursday.

Somebody involved with the school picked us up from the airport, brought us to the bus station, and sort of set us up with the right bus, but we had to spend about three hours waiting in the bus station for the direct bus to Gracias. It was really hot in San Pedro so we passed the time by watching our pile of bags to make sure they didn’t get stolen and drinking water out of bags (just like the milk we used to have in school for anyone who remembers). When we got on the bus they were pretty angry that we had eight bags for two people, which all had to be stored on the racks above everyone’s heads. Although it was called the “Express” bus, it wasn’t exactly nonstop. We were the only people who rode the entire way and most people were only on for a few of the cow dodgings and death-defying passes on blind hills and curves. The bus driver was a very impressive driver though and somehow got the bus full of people and stuff going about 80mph. We never got passed by anyone. The scenery was beautiful as well. The entire trip (somewhere around 150 miles) was entirely through hills and farms and rivers, which is not really what I pictured Honduras to be like. Lots of farms were on what looked to be a 60 degree incline with either corn growing (I have no idea how long it must take to harvest) or cow terraces everywhere.

Like I said before most of the trip was pretty smooth, but the only tough part came when we got to Gracias. It was dark, we just finished getting all of our bags off the bus and it started to pour. We thought someone was going to meet us at the bus station but that apparently was a miscommunication and eventually we figured out that we needed to take a tuk-tuk (motortaxi in Honduras) to the hotel that the former owner of the school runs. It’s a really nice hotel and we’ve been staying here while our house is being prepared, and while we wish we were in our house it is a good place to spend some time.

Right now, we are on Mountain time, so we’re 2 hours behind Eastern and 1 behind Central. When daylight savings time begins there, we’ll be on Central time because Honduras doesn’t do daylight savings. One of the most surprising things that we noticed right away is that it gets dark early here…around 6:30. They say that the length of the days doesn’t vary much throughout the year, though, so even in winter it will get dark around the same time—maybe half an hour earlier. I guess that’s because it’s closer to the equator than home. So there isn’t much difference in weather or daylight here throughout the year, and I wonder if that will make time pass faster or slower? We’ll see…that seems to be the answer to everything around here. I don’t think it’s possible to live here happily and not be flexible.

Speaking of being flexible, we still don’t really know what we’ll be doing at the school. The people in charge are supposedly arriving tomorrow (although they were supposed to arrive today), so I expect they have some information about what we’ll teach and what kinds of expectations they have for us, but for now, we’re just relaxing, exploring the area, and meeting people. Right now, we’re still staying at the hotel in town (a very nice place, actually, and owned by someone associated with the school), but we’ll be moving out to our own house tomorrow (so we hear). The town is called Gracias, and the school is about 4 miles away in Villa Verde. The dirt road there is uphill the whole way, but the views are beautiful. Our house is another 2/3 of a mile or so past the school on the same road, right at the entrance to a national park and a mountain called Celaque. It looks like we’ll be getting plenty of exercise when we want to go into town! We’re thinking of getting some bikes, though, in hopes of making travel a little faster (on the downhill trip into town, anyway). We’ve walked up and back a couple of times now, and it’s do-able, especially with a stop at this little pulperia along the way, which is a tiny convenience store run by this moustached guy named Jesus. He has a stuffed snake on his wall that, according to him, he killed after it bit him while he was walking through the forest on a 6-day trek. Most everyone we’ve met is really pretty friendly and patient with our broken Spanish.

As for our house, we’ll post some pictures of our house when we get settled in and find some furniture, but to give you a rough idea, it’s a small blue house made of stone or adobe/concrete, and inside the floors are all tile and the windows have screens (a big relief for us!) and wooden shutters that close from the inside. We have a front room—future living room—a kitchen with a fridge and hopefully a stove/oven soon, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. There isn’t much furniture in any of the rooms yet, but we do have a bed and some shelves. We’ll see what else we can scrounge up at the school and around town. We have a yard, too, so we’ll try to plant a garden with some veggies, make a compost area, and maybe a fire pit. The river runs right by our house down below the yard, so it’ll be nice to hear that all the time.

Today we bought a cell phone, which was actually a lot easier than I was anticipating, and we bought a bunch of food at the supermercado. This store has about as much as a 7-11 or gas station would have in the States, but the owner is named Melanie, and since pretty much everyone in the town knows her, most people can pronounce some version of my name, which here sounds like May-lah-nee-ah. Aaron, like in Japan, is Ah-ron. Anyway, we should be able to use our phone to call home, so we’ll give that a try sometime soon. Hopefully, this combined entry hasn’t been too convoluted, but if you’ve read all the way to the end, maybe you have as much free time as we do right now, and life is good! We’ll try to be regular about adding to this, but we’ll check our email as often as we can as well, so feel free to write! We miss you all and want to do our best to stay in touch! Hasta Luego!