Copan Ruinas

Sipping a White Russian in my going-out jeans and tank top, looking around as friends and new acquaintances chat and flirt and request songs to be added to the itunes playlist, I feel closer to New York City than my Honduran hometown. I'm in an open air restaurant bought on the internet for $4,000 by a 23-year-old Californian only five weeks ago. He tells us, in between grabbing drinks for the customers who are, at this point in the evening, all teachers from private bilingual schools, that he majored in hotel and restaurant management, so really it'’s not as random as it sounds. Even as I admire the risk he's taking, I am gaping simply at the entire atmosphere of this place, Copan Ruinas, where I am out on a Friday night. That is, I am really out and not just on a trek down a dusty road to the pulperia that's open until nine to pick up some cornflakes or light bulbs for the back porch. I'’m put in the mind of summer evenings walking down Broadway in my tailored pants and Ann Taylor Loft sweaters, listening to Bloc Party on my way to meet friends for drinks at happy hours.

Ever since I arrived, but with a fevered intensity of late, I have been fantasizing about stumbling across a coffeeshop in my hometown here. Not to transport me back to my professional girl days, but just to evoke the peaceful happiness of those afternoon and evening coffees. "Oh!" I say in my dreams. "It's right here!"” And all the Hondurans I tell just smile and say, "“Of course it'’s right there."” So when faced with the prospect of going to a coffeeshop in Copan, I took a long time choosing, to draw out the pleasure.

The one I chose has dark wood trim and tiles painted in a brick imitation that defies the classlessness implied in imitation--—it is innovative, the terra cotta bringing a tropical feel to a classic American style. The shop has three sides, the fourth has only a bar bench that marks the border of soothing order and the lush wild flourishing of the owners'’ front yard garden. The meadow grasses and flowers hide bits of the mountain view, a medley of small-scale color and greater green majesty. The mochaccino, served in a big ceramic mug, was sweet and soothing, as it should be. All was right with the world, and for a moment I could stop thinking about tourism, gringos, development, and the contrasts between life in Copan and in my hometown.

Visiting Copan makes me aware of how undeveloped my hometown would seem to a tourist, even though it is by no means rural or isolated. My hometown is just a regular place where showers are always cold, roads are always dusty, and uniformed schoolchildren swarm the streets. In Copan, there are restaurants that serve foods besides the platos tipicos and hostels with Israeli and Dutch backpackers. Souvenir shops and foreigners are ubiquitous, there are English book trade spots and shopowners quote me prices in American dollars. (I can't resist assuring them that I only have lempiras, that I live here now. I eat hamburger with real beef, albeit one only a centimeter thick and missing my tajadas (plantain chips) as I stare down the anemic french fries.

Everything's a bit mixed up in my mind in Copan. It'’s a disorienting place, with baleadas sencillas for 10 lemps and imported Gala apples from Chile for 12. I get confused about who I'm supposed to speak to in Spanish and who in English. A friend and I meet an Irish guy in the hostel while he'’s waiting to use the shower that is off our room and because he starts speaking to us in Spanish we keep speaking it, even when he says he'’s from Ireland. I mean, I knew we should start speaking in English at that point, but we were in a rhythm, even as he got increasingly weirded out. Another friend walks in and breaks the spell by saying, “Wait a minute, did you say you were from Ireland? Why are you guys speaking in Spanish?" We start laughing, but I'm mortified, particularly when he says, "Well, I don'’t like to presume that you speak English, but you said you were from the States and then kept responding in Spanish..."

I've started trying more often to make conversation in general, and particularly with the Hondurans I interact with--—the guys at the stand where I buy a coffee granita after school (a wonderful, wonderful find of last week), the woman who sells me a bag in a craft market in Copan. I tell people a lot what I do, but I'm much more interested in hearing how they spend their time, what their thoughts are. Some people--—like the women at the bus stop on the way to Copan--will barely let you get a word in once they start. (They aren't fans of the current president at all, because he doesn'’t do anything for the real people, the poor people, they say, and in our town no one has papers for the land, so the government says they could make everyone move and use the land, so everything under this new president really isn'’t going well, and by the way, it's dangerous for us four to be traveling without a man.)

To get to Copan, my friends and I board a bus that is not supposed to stop. (We called to ask them to look out for us at our boulevard.) Thus we can't really complain that there are no seats left. We brace ourselves against the coach bus seats, transplanted into an old American school bus, along with a sweet sound system, of course. More than an hour later, when some passengers disembark from the "direct"” bus, we gain seats. As I plop down, I notice a friend giving me a goofy look. I turn to my right. The woman next to me has two chickens in a cardboard box--—the first chickens I have seen on a bus, in fact, despite the American slang name for cut-rate Honduran buses. Not a big deal, except that she seems to keep inching the box closer and closer to me, and one chicken seems increasingly interested in stretching its head towards me. I scrunch up towards the aisle and manage to nod off, but am awakened by the chicken lightly pecking at my leg. The woman is giving the other one some water out of a plastic cup. I start staring the friendly chicken down, but he seems unintimidated. But somehow IÂ’m more comfortable with him than a previous trip, when a woman was nursing her baby next to me for most of the time and immediately behind me was a chatty man whose conversation starter was, "I lived in Texas." At that point, I did, in fact feel compelled, as surely you would, to ask where and why. "“Prison. Undocumented."” It'’s okay, though: he found God there. Whatever journey these chickens are making is probably pretty significant for their lives, but they don't want to talk about it, and since the road by that point is sickeningly windy, I can't say I mind.

On our second night in Copan, seeking fun, my friends and I headed to a bar further afield. We started talking to some guys in their late teens, and were startled when one responded to a question in perfect, American-accented English. "We were the first class at the Mayatan school," another guy explained. (I hope future students from our school, who will attend it for their entire elementary education careers, will speak so well someday.) Two of the three guys were dressed like New York hipsters. Like I said, very disorienting. All of the sudden, we found ourselves across the street from two men engaged in a brawl—with knives. Two other men jumped into the fray with their own knives as we ourselves jumped, behind our new Honduran friends. "“Don'’t worry, we'’ll protect you,"” they assured us in English as we ran to the bar, terrified. When we were in the clear, they told us that women are pretty safe in those situations, since they just never get involved in the fights, and besides, everyone in town looks out for the tourists.

"“We'’re fortunate,"” one long-time resident told us that same night. "“We have the tourism." Somehow--assumming some prototype of an ignorant American looking for the pristine exotic locale--—I expected the woman to talk about how all the foreigners have overrun her childhood home. But whereas in my adopted town, many people are self-employed or work in the maquilas, in Copan, teaching Spanish or otherwise catering to the tourists is the way to advance oneself. I was happy to speak with her; she is a woman I admire, a woman with a strong voice for her ideas. She suggested firmly as we spoke that our teacher team set a schedule for speaking Spanish at home, since we spend so much time together conversing in English. She even proposed a harsh punishment for the disobedient: doing the others'’ laundry. And of course we got teased for finding laundry so hard, protesting that we didn'’t cry the first time we did laundry at the pila: —those were beads of sweat!

The reason behind the tourism, the old Mayan city, is beautiful and peaceful--—surely not the way it presented when the buildings were whole and in use. That wonderful green lawn must have trampled by priests pouring liquid offerings into the altars, athletes pouring out of the locker rooms (yes, they did have rooms they used for changing, archaeologists believe) to play a ball game whose stakes were death, servants going on errands, carvers assembling crews for the king'’s latest commission. My friend and I didn'’t pay for a guide, so we listened in on several snippets of lecture in English and Spanish at various points during our wander around the grounds. We saw the longest Mayan hieroglyphic inscription in Latin America, featured on a huge stairway that archaeologists reassembled in largely random order. At first we were hesitant to climb on the ruins, but we soon got into it, even if we were saddened to see some teenaged girls checking out each others' makeup while perched on top of a temple. My friend and I took a couple shots of each other from a hilltop with an arm out, as if saying, "“All this is my kingdom!" Also, we spent a few solid minutes poking fun at the folks who were videotaping. A whole lot of action shots at the ruins of an ancient city, eh? The serene Sculpture Museum provided us with useful explanations, such as that "pop" meant "“mat,"” and showcased some of the originals that they have replaced outdoors with replicas. (Sadly, it'’s a bit hard to tell the difference.) It also presented a lifesize replica of a temple called the Rosalila, which was found whole underneath another temple. The design of the museum is supposed to replicate the experience of finding the temple: —visitors walk through a long, dark, tunnel and then come out into the light to find the bright orange-red building. Considering how peaceful our trip was, though, I'll speculate that more people come to Copan now because it is built up as a tourist town than for the ruins themselves. But I'’m sure those ruins--—stark stone and strange imagery--make an impact on those who take a break from buying cheap ruins replicas to go look.

We snuck out of Copan at daybreak, slipping past the backpackers in the other room, and the young restaurant owner, who says not finding more permanent lodging has been good for recruiting business. We packed up and woke up the vigilante at the hostel who camps out on the porch, got our lock deposit back, and boarded the 6 am bus back home. When we arrived at 10 am, exhausted and somewhat unsteady on our feet from the sickening speedy downhill spiraling our bus did in the mountains, we got right back to work: our first stop was the copy shop, to ask what time they planned to close today. The first exam period of the year starts tomorrow, and while being here is a vacation in some ways, for our students it is most definitely real life. And real life means work--for them, and for us.

I am, however, hosting a memoir-reading tea party on Wednesday to sweeten the deal.

'I didn't want to eat. I only wanted to spend time with the horse.'

And now you’ll want to hear about my students, and how they behave, and how well they speak English, and what they do that is endearing, and what they do that is insufferable, and how they have grown in the month since school began.

And I hold out my hands, browning daily in the sunny schoolyard, and wiggle my fingers—a magic trick. I conjure up a vision of them: sitting, standing, slouching over their desks. But the vision is not whole. It is a holograph to be looked at from one angle and then another, a computer screen that flickers when filmed.

“I forgot my homework,” F. tells me.
“You forgot it? That’s too bad. You’ll have to stay in for recess.”
F. grabs a page in her notebook and rips, then motions with it in my direction.
“No, miss.... She smiles.
A few minutes later she does the same act with presentation she is scheduled to give. Amazingly enough, I fall for it again.

The school director walks into my classroom to get a student to discuss a discipline issue. “Están tomando un examen?” It is a beautiful moment. They are in fact working on their second drafts of their memoirs. They were resistant to the idea of continuing to work on them, but working they are. A few have even added details based on an exercise—which they only partially processed—on different ways to begin a story. Alas the two students who have the most trouble settling down to work will be pulled out of class. (They were calling a classmate names, and that classmate is a bit of a tattletale.) I instantly blame myself for not better handling behavior management and discipline. I wonder what those two students might have written if they had stayed in class. The beautiful moment is broken.

But the students have written some heartfelt pieces, intimate, full of lines that are telling and lines that are inadvertently poignant:

When I went to school, I did not want to go play at lunch. My teacher called my parents to ask them what was wrong. I was traumatized. ..... Three years later my father left the alcohol.

I didn’t want to eat. I only wanted to spend time with the horse.

My grandfather’s nickname was Papiman. He would always give me five lempiras to buy candy.

I ask a student in class one day whether she is sick—her eyes are red, her face looks a little puffy. She says she is fine with a flat, strained voice that sounds like the indifferent tone she always uses. But the next day I see her crying during lunch. How could I not have realized she was upset? It has something to do with a boy, I think. I don’t know what to say. Her other teacher gives her permission to skip the next class. I awkwardly give her a pat on the back and say, “Hope you feel better.” I doubt she is comforted.

Another day. The boys in my class ask me, “What did you do to your hair?” They want to know why I cut it, where I cut it, and why does one side look shorter than the other? When I lean over their desks to ask them questions about their work they reach up to touch it. I remind them of our class “no touching” rule. I tell one student that I don’t touch his hair, either. Of course, he offers that I could if I wanted to. Walked into that one.

A girl observes that another girl is very flexible. “She is a snake.” I ask why. “She drew a picture of a pig with my name on it. She is a snake." She doesn’t seem shaken by the interaction, and I am so proud of her chain of thought. I consider that perhaps I should not ask students to describe each other when we continue our work on metaphors.

The students whine a lot. They complain a lot. They say “Ayyy Misssss!” They try to convince me that I said the vocabulary quiz would be on Tuesday, that they didn’t know, that they had too much work and it’s very unfair and they did not have time to study, and didn’t you say it was Tuesday—you did, you did! I find it very hard not to get visibly angry. These kids are very lucky to be going to school, but like kids everywhere they don’t appreciate it much. It’s comforting, somehow, to know that kids everywhere are so similar. They call school a jail (“But jail is better because you have TV and you can relax,” one student told me), want only to talk to their friends, spend too little time on their homework, and need to borrow pencils. It can be hard to keep that in focus after a trip to City Mall, where the clothes are American style with American prices and all the classic fast food chains are there. (Watching an undubbed Lindsey Lohan movie in the air-conditioned City Mall movie theater made me ridiculously homesick.) But always I am reminded of how their experience of normal is different in the details. One student’s father works in the States, illegally. He has been gone three years, and he’s supposed to return, but...

There are so many stories that I want to discover, and I hope my students will let me into their lives in the same way that I’m trying to let them into mine. They are fascinated to hear about my life in New York, my family, my friends and their extraordinary world adventures. They love to ask questions about topics I know about off the top of my head that are new to them, like Judaism. If you want to expand their interest, mail me some matzoh—they would love to try it.

My students--seventh, eighth and ninth graders--at times seem a bit anomalous in the context of the whole school. To have stuck it out this long, past the government-mandated sixth grade education, they generally have parents who are very involved in the school. There are fewer scholarship students, and on the whole their families are really committed to helping secure a strong future for them. For that reason, I sometimes feel that I am not getting the chance to grasp first-hand the wide variety of our school attendees’ experiences. I also feel detached from the school community on occasion because the junior high is in its own building and my classes are smaller, so I know fewer kids. But then I walk to school and get passed by a busito, the students scream “Miss!” and stick their arms out the windows to wave. Then a first-grader being taken to school on a bicycle yells “Good morning!” at me from quite a distance and repeats the phrase until I snap out of my daze and yell back. Then a group of students sings The Wheels on the Bus to me at recess. I realize I am a part of it all. I just have to keep pulling myself into the mix.

**********

I decided after racing through the book Banker to the Poor that in the future I want to manage something big and ambitious and innovative. I like to manage, even if it’s just the creation of a house stir-fry meal. I remind myself that I’m scaling up, to adopt business-speak. Putting out the paper five days a week was a warm-up for placing knowledge in twenty adolescent minds five days a week. I foresee even greater and similarly serendipitously wonderful challenges ahead. Maybe in that vague “ahead” place, I’ll even be able to escape the painfully earnest tenor of this paragraph.