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’.
