Taking refuge in cool Cusuco

The mountains in Cusuco are so beautiful. In the dusk they are beautiful and dark in the ever-darkening sky and no camera can capture them. I have never seen so many stars before—not even that time in Maine when I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. I can’t count those stars, could never count them, and the big aloneness of it or the old friends in my mind or the cold breeze on my bare feet make tears roll around my eyes. The stars stay up there, blinking and blurring, but the tears will not fall out.

The town lies below, like in storybooks, but not with poetic pinpricks of light: the blobs of orange light are streetlights that supervise the cars I can’t see swerving around dusty deep potholes and expose the green in the puddles I can’t see where frogs ping like a fast-paced video game. I feel homesick for this place that is not mine, knowing the cars and frogs are there. It has made itself present to me through a real expression of its essential self. Human-made, it declares, shining into the mountains covered in types of ferns that dinosaurs once ate.

The coffee we drink in Cusuco is straight from the palo, rich and warm. In the morning I dip in pieces of my puffy fried tortillas, already sugary-sweet with naranja marmelada that the cooking women have made in their homes. How, I ask them. I think, How and who and what and when and why. The jelly, I clarify. Yes, the delicious jelly. How do you make the jelly, and how do you live this life—this life that is yours and mine and not ever ours. They tell me how. They pick the fruit near their homes and boil it, they say, they add the sugar and the pectin, they say, they put it in jars when it is gelatinous and hot hot, they say, really hot. They tell me that tomatoes are out of season already, planted in January and harvested in June or July. For the tortillas, they make three slits in each—look, like this, así—to make them expand with the heat of the stove. Two of the sons of the cooking women sit on a bench, whispering to each other. One boy tells me he likes mathematics best in school. That detail seems more important than the two teachers in the school, than the hundred students in the school. Scrawny chicks huddle together under a small overhang to get out of the rain and they are more important than me getting soaked. The woman at the top of a mountain nearby has story lines in her face. But I just coo at the plants that she sells. I just offer her a leftover piece of breakfast tortilla and ask, How many years have you lived here? Forty, she says. The number weighs her down, makes her sink into a pace in my mind where she will not flit away.

In the forest our guide feeds us tart citrus fruit, guayaba, or guava, and pieces of an acidic stem that supposedly alleviates thirst. There are too many plants and too many plant names. One tree grows flowers that are an official plant of El Salvador—and that Hondurans eat fried with nationalistic glee. There are three kinds of ferns. Some vines are like wood and good for swinging. Some vines that look the same are like plants and will break under your weight. Cola de mono looks like a monkey’s hairy tail, curled towards the sun, oreja del burro is a split-open seed-pod that falls to the ground. Labios de mujer look lascivious, painted a too-bright purple. We hike to a waterfall and lie on rocks near the cold spray.

One day we get a ride down to our lodge with a family from the city who escaped for the weekend to camp in the coolness of the mountains. They talk about colonias in New Jersey they have visited and I am startled to realize a colonia is not something exclusive to here—it’s just a word. The truck’s CD player shows reggaeton music videos. The contrast between it and the truck we take to school sometimes was as great as the climate difference between the mountains and our town in its heat-trapping valley.

After a tranquil weekend, the ride home is violent—an appropriately driving rain bombards us as we squat in the back of a pickup truck. Water puddles in our clothes and stings our faces. We slide backward and forward as the truck strains to climb inclines and swung around steep downhill curves. My arms get sore from bracing myself on the side of the truck. But as we descend, the air gets thicker and warmer and the rain slows to a drizzle. Our clothes begin to dry and we lose the subdued, survivalist look of endurance. As we drive back into the colonias surrounding the center of town, we began to sing—Disney’s greatest hits. We swing our dripping, sleeve-sheathed arms to wave adios to gawking families. On foot we might have been embarrassed, but soaking, exhausted from hiking, and anxious to be home, we are glad to be united, singing, back in the gringo spotlight.

School becomes laundromat

On a break from band practice, A. drums her way around the school office, maneuvering around a cactus-like plant and ducking nonchalantly under a row of underwear, hanging from a clothesline attached to the office and the flagpole. A friend and I had hung our underwear there to try to keep it out of sight. We had suspended the rest of our clothes among the playground equipment, my towel drying snug up against the swing set, my shirts adding some color to a glance at the school’s gray block walls.

M. approaches as I throw more shirts and skirts into a big blue bucket and sprinkle in some laundry detergent, then grab another item to scrub and rinse it on the board next to the pila. “Laundry, teacher?” he asks with a smile. Even here, the sight of a teacher doing her laundry at school on a Saturday is worth a grin. I’m embarrassed, so I shrug modestly—“Still no water in town, so it's better to do the laundry here.” Usually the water only goes out for seven or eight hours at a time, but the water has been out since Thursday morning. M. shrugs back, since he lives in town, too, and then runs off to get back to practice.

The Independence Day parade is only six days away, and the band still sounds a bit garbled. For bands here, the instruments are primarily drums and xylophones, and dancing while playing is an important element. The twenty or so band members do a nice job with some tunes I don’t know, as well as the Honduran National Anthem and an excellent rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” Last night when we were hanging out in the dark, without power, we heard the sounds of a band, so we walked out to the town square and discovered a parade for Children’s Day organized by some public schools. Dozens of children marched with blue, red, or green lanterns containing candles, and several bands much larger than ours performed, stopping at the entrance to the square to do an endless series of dances and beats involving turns, spinning of sticks, bobbing in all directions, head-turns, and swinging of xylophones.

Last weekend, we saw another sort of performance: a soccer game! Really not exciting enough to merit an exclamation point, since the score was cero cero. Made me understand why soccer games can become violent. There were guards with machine guns all around the edge of the field, staring at the crowd for the entire game, but the only crazy event was that some fans used the squares of paper handed out for confetti to start a small fire. We cheered for Olímpia even though Real Espana is technically our team because the Hondurans we were with object to the name Real Espana. One explained matter-of-factly, in Spanish: “The Spaniards killed our ancestors.” The trip home was way more exciting than the game. After squeezing onto the super-crowded bus and finding a seat between two guys who revealed they had some space available—“They want your body,” my already seated friend said, “but that’s okay,” I got to enjoy some fun conversation. “It’s really dangerous for you to be out late at night.” In response, I observed politely that it looked like it was going to rain and within a few minutes, lightening began to flash menacingly in the sky, rain came pounding down, the bus tilted frighteningly as we drove on the sidewalk to avoid puddles, and the lights flickered. At least we weren’t getting a ride home in the back of somebody’s pickup truck, as we so often do around town! But we made it home safely and capped off the experience with a mad dash home from the main street through mud and puddles and huge streams of water cascading down the abrupt drop-off that is our street.

You may have difficulty understanding my life this week here if you have done any of the following: taken a warm shower, turned on the AC, flushed a toilet and thrown your toilet paper in with it, washed your dishes with water from the tap, enjoyed an entire day of uninterrupted electricity. But you can approximate the experience a bit by making a lime licuado. Buy some limes, throw them in a blender with some sugar (okay, a lot of sugar), milk, water. Strain. Add some ice and blend again. Then pour into a tall glass and enjoy. I promise that it’s gonna be slammin’.

Striving for tranquilo

A bunch of platanos hangs from our rafters on the back porch and several white and light-blue birds have come by thinking to themselves, "“Sweet! A birdfeeder!"” It'’s very cute, actually. Less cute are the many types of ants who reside in our house. We have one kind of ant, a rather large, light-brown ant in the bathroom, and both large and small black ants in the kitchen. I had heard that ants bite, but I had never experienced the fury of tiny, tiny black ants--—well, of any ants, actually--until recently, when I was brutally attacked while attempting to cook pancakes. They sure do sting! Cleaning the kitchen became a serious priority immediately afterwards. Unfortunately, it is impractical to sweep and mop every single time anyone eats anything. Due to the lack of snack foods in Honduras, we have become huge fans of popcorn. In other animal news, last night we definitely spotted a tarantula on the back wall of our yard. It seems to have disappeared today, so I am hoping it went to visit the neighbors.

It has been a super busy week. After the teacher'’s meeting today, conducted in Spanish, of course, I felt saturated in Spanish enough to think to myself, "“It has been a week super-busy."” (I'’d like to take this moment to praise the director of the school, who speaks slowly and clearly enough that I actually understand her very well.) My favorite thing that I have picked up on is using bien as an adverb, as in "Es bien fri­o" or even "“Es bien malo"! Right now es bien caliente--this afternoon a mini-thermometer for science experiments showed 98 degrees. At 7 pm, with the sun set, it has dropped to 92 degrees.

I just realized that I have not mentioned on the blog that we had a full roster of fun events last weekend, namely a birthday party last Friday and karaoke--—which was hysterical--—on Saturday night, plus a huge feast for H's birthday on Sunday night. I led the creation of the stir-fry, and it was awesome, if I do say so myself. Most interestingly, though, when I went to church on Sunday morning, I found the church overflowing with people as a result of the thirty-one weddings taking place. There were kids eating flavored ices, adults fanning themselves madly, and couple after couple approaching the bishop to accept the vows. On the altar there was one up, and one on deck.

On Sunday night, after a full but fun weekend, I realized that I really had not planned properly for the week. Several nights this week I stayed up until 12:30 or 1:30 am getting ready, and then woke up at 5:50 in the morning. It was very painful. But settling into the new classrooms was great--—it's so nice to have my own space. When I looked at the room this afternoon before I left, I realized just how crazy it is that I'’m here with my very own classroom to set up and decorate and maintain. I have hung some posters on the walls with a rubber cement glue called UHU, and I need to hang up more. It just feels like such a commitment, because things pasted with UHU are not easily separated from the wall again. I have a line with clothespins attached to the window bars (I may have delusionally said previously there are screens, but in fact there are not) and I hang some papers there, but we get quite the breeze in our tiny Junior High pasillo, so they don'’t survive too well there. My co-Junior High teacher has crafted a nifty bulletin board out of cardboard and I really should do the same. I have been hanging up some inspirational quotes, in addition to the National Geographic maps. I made the ninth graders write last night about an Albert Einstein quote: "“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."” I'm looking forward to seeing what they have come up when I get around to grading their homework--really soon, I resolve in this very moment.

It was a pretty good week with the kids. I'’m setting up some new routines: a "Take One/Leave One" folder at the door for depositing homework and picking up handouts, space on the shelf for journals and for folders for in-class projects, vocab tests and independent reading time on Fridays. I find grading to be one of the more painful parts of being a teacher because I feel responsible when, for example, someone doesn't understand the assignment. But if other folks did, or asked questions until they did, then I think I have to subtract points.... I'’ve been thinking a lot about what it would be like to be in school and not be that great of a student. Those are the students whose minds I really need to get inside, so I can figure out how to help them.

Today was a half day for a teacher meeting, and next Friday is the Dia de Los Ninos, so the kids come to school for only three hours and play games we make for them. The week after we have another half day and a day off for the Di­a de Independencia parade. Hondurans are all about their celebrations. Makes it a bit hard to get in a school routine, though. I can get really frustrated here at times, because it is so hot, and I always feel so dirty (so much dust!), and life here is simply exhausting. Fortunately my sufferings have been alleviated somewhat because I have fallen in love with liquados, a true substitute for Starbucks drinks. Sipping a banana liquado puts me in the same mood as when I drink a chai creme--a mood I now have a word for: tranquilo.