Getting Settled

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

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!