Venturing outside Honduras!

In the more-than-a-month since I updated my blog, a whole lot has happened. For starters, my ninth graders graduated! Next year, I'm happy to say, many of them will be going on to solid bilingual schools in San Pedro Sula, and with some of your support, we should be able to award a needy and very deserving student a partial scholarship to make it possible for him to continue his bilingual studies.

Right after the Saturday graduation--at 3 am on Sunday morning--some fellow teachers and I whisked the kids away on a trip to Roatan. The kids have been fundraising for it since the start of the new year, and their efforts, combined with some key donations and some really amazing support from a hotel on West Bay, made it possible. It was so wonderful to see kids who barely know how to swim starting to feel comfortable in the water, playing around in kayaks, and learning to snorkel. I loved the glass bottom boat, even though it made me seasick, because we got to see 2 sea turtles swimming around! It was a really special trip for me to be there with them and also to be experiencing that kind of natural beauty for the first time with them.

The other happening of note on that trip was that I got my hair cut: layered and (ever so slightly) highlighted--for the first time ever! I'm so happy.

The day after I got back from Roatan, my brother arrived in Honduras! We immediately embarked on a whirlwind 'highlights of Honduras' tour. On Friday we went on an awesome visit to the Pulhapanzak waterfall near Lago de Yajoa, during which we walked under the 45 m high falls. The only word for an experience like that is EXHILARATING. You can't see anything at all and it's hard to move forward because the water is pounding down so hard....and then you get to a part when you can look up and you're sort of behind the falls--not totally sheltered, but enough to at least grab a few quick glances up. When we got back from the waterfall (after eating the homemade cookies mom and dad sent down with the bro and rocking out a little in the parking lot), we went to the feria de san pedro to check out the wiiide variety of products available. I got a Golden Delicious Apple, which I have not had since Christmas, I think. It was great. We also, of course, went out to Klein and had a very chill evening.

Saturday was recouperation day....Sunday we went to Copan Ruinas and enjoyed checking out the Mayan ruins and eating a very good meal. My bro managed to polish off everybody's leftovers, which made quite an impression. His height is surprising enough in Honduras. Now that we're hanging out with the 'backpacker crowd,' though, I suppose it's not as novel. I packed up my stuff on Monday and on Tuesday at 5 am we embarked on the bus ride to Managua. Managua was terrible, like everybody says it is...I wish we had tried to go straight on to Granada. The best thing that can be said for it was that we got the chance to catch up on sleep.

Now we're here in Granada at a cool hostel with free internet...(yay!) This afternoon we swam in the Laguna de Apoyo, a lake formed in a volcano crater. The water was gorgeous, and the green mountains around it were perfectly picturesque. Tomorrow I think we'll head to a volcano and then we're thinking we'll try to get out to Isla de Ometepe, which is the island in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua. It's funny just to be traveling and chilling after so much time in Honduras teaching. Living the life of leisure is cool, but also kind of stressful in its own way. I'm trying my best just to relax and enjoy the ride. I'm really missing my boring, dirty little hometown in Honduras right now, actually, and the friends I made there and in SPS. But we're going to mantener al tanto, so no worries!

All good things....

Two weeks of class left of the school year, and it’s pretty hard to believe how far I’ve come. Of course, that somehow makes these last weeks seem reeaally slow.

Some events of note recently:

Birthday celebration. Had a fun little dessert and drinks party on the back porch with my fellow teachers on the eve of my birthday before heading out to San Pedro to Kline Bar. There I heard two great local rock bands and had a fun time hanging out while enjoying numerous free drinks.

Surprise from the students. After Actos Civicos on Monday morning, one of my students approached me to ask me a question about the exam schedule. It was a ludicrous question and he couldn’t really keep a straight face. That’s when I realized there was more birthday celebration in the works. “Let me help you out,” I said, “Ask me about my weekend.” When we walked back to the classroom, everybody shouted surprise and presented the huge breakfast feast they had brought. But even better was that they brought a pinata! I learned that it’s pretty hard to hit the pinata when you’re legitimately blindfolded and turned around 24 times. All in all, it was a really nice way to celebrate.

Cusuco trip. On Thursday morning, my students announced that they wanted to go to Cusuco. On Friday. I told them that if they organized it all, we could go. To do my part, I walked home during recess to get the phone number of the guide. They called and arranged the tour, arranged transportation, wrote the permission slip, and got permission from the school administration. So we went. On Friday morning, they all showed up in their hiking clothes—or at least their non-school clothes—and we set off. We heard a small lecture about the park, which formerly was a logging site, but became a protected area in the 1950s, and then had a great “breakfast” provided by the students. Within the first five minutes of the hike they were all whining—“No aguanto más!” But eventually they settled down and got into the rhythm of hiking. We saw a quetzal in its tree nest, well, really just the blue and green tail feathers sticking out. Our guide just couldn’t convince the bird that it wanted to come out to spend time with 7th and 8th graders. A few times during steep downhill portions of the trail, the kids started slipping and sliding around, their Converse tennies lacking the tread to help them get their grip. Once one student fell down and that set off a domino effect, knocking down two other students and even the guide!

Birthday celebration 2 (3?). Since the two friends of mine who live in the city were away last weekend—are leaving this week!—they hosted a birthday/goodbye party/any other random occasion gathering in their apartment this past Saturday. Alas they had actually stayed out until 6 am the night before, so they weren’t in a wild and crazy party mood, but we had a fun time anyway. And we had a lot of time early in the evening to hear some funny stories via ‘Two truths and a lie’ and ‘Never have I ever.’

Other excellence. My awesome sister graduated magna cum laude this past weekend. In other words, she’s a huge rockstar. AND I received a package from my parents! So I ate Golden Grahams for breakfast this morning—albeit with boxed skim milk—while reading a New York Times magazine. And unlike yesterday, there actually was electricity when I woke up this morning. Now that is beautiful.

A whirlwind week

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” (Rodin)

Lesser-known saying: Nothing like taking life advice from chai tea bags.

Rock-bottom. On Wednesday, I experienced the lowest of low times with my seventh/eighth grade class. They were just really, truly uncooperative and disrespectful. I was so at a loss that I let them go a few minutes early to recess—which I never do, so as not to give in to their frequent pleas to go just ten minutes, just five minutes, just two minutes early. I ended up sending all of them to the office at lunchtime so they could get a talking-to from the school’s director. I’m happy to say that Thursday was much, much better and on Friday I even got a few apologies. I hope that last week was a turning point and that they can spend the last four weeks before the exam and retest weeks peacefully doing the best they can to improve their English. Teaching has been difficult for me and I don’t expect any miracles, but I would like to end the year on a positive note.

Rodeo! On Sunday afternoon, I experienced several special events. I witnessed grown men (some straight from the disreputable billardes hall nearby) showing off for video cameras their sweet....jump rope skills. Yes, jump rope. It was evidently part of the town feria that’s going on this week. It seemed to be a special kind of jump rope situation, with two ropes at right angles to each other, which was a seemingly impossible configuration. Each time, several men would try to jump in and would make it only a few jumps before tripping. After checking that out, I headed to a field near the boulevard with some friends to the RO-DAY-OH! When we arrived, we paid the 50 lemp entrance fee and maneuvered past the cases of beer to the rough bleachers that had been set up about 10 feet from the “ring”—a U.S.-suburban-living-room-sized enclosure made of wooden posts (still in very tree-like form) and metal gates. We soon realized that most of the announcer’s time would be devoted to admonishing people who had entered earlier (without paying, evidently) in trucks and were standing in the truck beds to see into the rodeo. Despite continuous pleas to people to “sean educados” and colaborar con nosotros,” the nonpayers continued to observe and actually tore down some of the black netting that surrounded the ring so they could get a better view.

Pacifist bulls? The rodeo itself was a bit pathetic. Most of the bulls were pretty small and seemed to have no interest in entering the ring at all. Maybe they’re pacificists. At any rate, none of them seemed too interested in getting riled up. Many of them lay down once they got right outside the entrance and the vaqueros were at some pains to get them out in the ring. Even when they could finally drag them into the ring, most bucked around for a couple minutes and then, having thrown the rider or not, trotted docilely over to the exit. One of my friends who has been to rodeos in Panama says the bulls there were bulls, not tame like these ones. I suppose there just isn’t too much in the way of cattle around here, plus it was probably a budget operation. The funniest moment was when the only white bull entered the ring, in a playful mood. He bucked his rider off in about five seconds and then ran around the entire ring near the fences, butting in the direction of the men and boys who had draped themselves over the top of the corral. Most scrambled to pull their legs out of the ring but weren’t too disturbed. The only ones who got a real scare were too younger boys, maybe about 10 and 12, who had taken a friend’s camera to get some close-up shots. They were leaning through the fence with the camera when the bull started charging around. One ran back towards the bleachers but the other, caught between the netting and the fence actually dove through a whole in the netting. It was hysterical, particularly when the bull then trotted back to the exit, calm once again. If only I had been close enough to get a photo of a bull smiling...

Going OUT. That whole experience was very small-town and Honduran, and was really accentuated by my Friday night. I met up with a friend in San Pedro and we grabbed some dinner at Applebee’s in near proximity to several groups of pre-teens. I had the “zesti” (as our waiter wrote it down) chicken sandwich, which was great. Then we hung around my friend’s apartment, waiting to get picked up by a guy who went to our college and his friend. We would have dressed a lot nicer (okay, only a little nicer, since I don’t really have super-nice clothes here with me—but definitely I would have worn good shoes) if we had realized we were being taken out on a serious night out. At one point I do believe we begged to be taken back to my friend’s apartment to change shoes. That must have been before I hit the point where I was disparaging various possible U.S. presidential candidates in a far too loud voice.

Making the rounds. First we went to a very nice bar that evidently serves thai food and has a killer atmosphere...nice outdoor bar with comfy couches and a tree-filled, candlelit atmosphere. At first I thought we had valet service everywhere, until I realized that the white truck behind us contained the body guards. Kidnappings are just popular enough to make that kind of thing advisable, I suppose. Then we headed to, well, basically San Pedro Sula’s country club. There’s a full-sized Olympic swimming pool there, in addition to various tennis courts, a children’s play area, restaurant, and more. We went to the lounge and grabbed a few more drinks, and then headed to a classy club. (The ones we had been to before were part of what someone referred to as the “maybe get shot tour” of San Pedro.) It was indeed nice, albeit a bit smoky, and we heard all the reggaeton standbys, like “Acercate a mi” and some American favs as well. The whole experience was such a marked contrast to my usual life here. It was really fun—it felt like a real vacation, a real true night out. But it was also pretty surreal and strange to hang out with folks who live in a way that people where I live can hardly imagine existing. I know there’s a separation like that in the states, but I’m just so much more aware of it here.

The week begins again. It was back to school again today, but we started the week off right with a little party for my kids’ teacher from last year. It was great to see how excited they were about seeing their former teacher, catching up and showing off how much they’ve learned in the past year. Alas, this is my awkward segue into making a pitch for a new scholarship fund my co-middle school teacher and I have started for our ninth graders. The idea is to give at least one scholarship this year (and in years to come!) to make it possible for a deserving graduate of the school to continue his or her bilingual education at a reputable school in San Pedro Sula. If you’re at all interested in learning more, please send me an email and I’ll give you the inside scoop on what it’s all about and how you can help.

Swinging through the trees

After the teacher’s meeting on Friday, I rushed back home to pack my backpack to go to Copan Ruinas for the weekend. A friend was going with her mom and her host family, so some of the other teachers and I got a ride with them in the back of the pickup truck. It was a scenic, albeit slightly nauseating, ride up the windy mountain road that begins after passing through La Entrada. We stopped along the way to get really ripe pineapple from a family selling it on the side of the road. Later....

“I can’t find my other flip-flop!” said the kinder/prepa teacher.
“Oh, I think I saw a flip-flop like that on the ground when we stopped to get pineapple. But I didn’t know it was yours...” said JE, the driver of the pick-up, with a shrug, totally straight-faced.

Five minutes later, the teacher finds his flip-flop. Nice joke, JE!

On Friday night we settled into our hostel, the Iguana Azul, and then had a drink at Twisted Tanya’s in tables perched at the edge of a second-floor balcony overlooking the mountains. We ate excellent non-tipico food at Via Via and had an early night.

Saturday morning we had a nice pancake breakfast out and then I had some decisions to make. My friends were going to tour the ruins with an illustrious tour guide of some repute as a comic and a charmer. (“The British stole the jade....those...bastards!”) I had already visited the ruins twice, so I wanted to do something else, but I wasn’t sure what. After talking with a woman at a coffeshop about a tour of a coffee finca, I decided I’d rather do the canopy tour—more time flexibility, plus I had just really wanted to do it the last time I was in Copan. So I signed up for the tour, after a trip to the ATM and a stopover at the library to buy the second two books of the “His Darkest Materials” series. (I had bought the first one, The Golden Compass, from there in February and polished it off in two happy days.) I befriended the nineteen-year-old Honduran girl working at the tour place while I waited for my ride. She wants to study tourism at university in San Pedro after working for a year. When I started humming along to one of the songs she was playing, we started talking about all the music she likes. She played me her favorite Switchfoot song and was super-jealous when I said a friend of mine had seen them in concert.

The canopy tour was awesome. An Israeli guy, a six-year-old and I did the course of more than a dozen cables, led by two Honduran guys my age. The six-year-old, Christian, was the most experienced of the customers—he seemed to be related to someone running the business, had his own harness, and spoke confidently about which cables were fast and slow. We started with a cable that Christian disparaged as very, very slow—although that didn’t stop him from calling back to us as he slid across that he was flying! The harness is like the ones used for rock climbing and it gets attached to your individual pulley at each cable platform—you grab onto the cable with your gloved hands and the guides give you a knee boost up to hook you on. Then they let go and let you slide away. You control your speed by keeping your dominant hand trailing on the cable behind the pulley. If you grip the cable tightly while arching your body towards it, that slows you down. My Israeli buddy kept breaking too much so the guides continually had to go several meters out onto the cable at the other end to reel him in. I loved the speed, though, which surprised me a bit since I am kind of scared of rock climbing and heights. I suppose it’s that it feels very secure and it’s a whole lot of fun to zip along with the trees below you, checking out the valley and the houses on the hilltops and even the ruins in the distance. Pretty soon I got down a great technique where I mostly didn’t break until about three-fourths of the way in and was able to control my entrance to the platform nearly perfectly, if I do say so myself. One of the guides was impressed enough to compliment me on it and ask if I was married.

The best cable trip was the one that is a meter long and goes over a river. Christian had to go paired with a guide on that one (usually one guide goes first and one goes last) because it gets really windy on the long cable, so if you don’t weigh too much and really control your speed you can end up just flipping around in circles. It was so exhilarating to race across the valley like that! The second-best run was a “slower” one where they showed me how to turn myself upside down, gripping the strap connecting me to the cable with my legs to sustain the position and letting my arms hang down. It was so awesome to look at all the trees from upside down! The stop at the end was a bit abrupt, though, since the guide basically has to catch you to stop you. They’re able to right themselves while moving if they do that, but they don’t try to make us beginners attempt that.

We took one brief walking interlude during our trip to see some rock formations carved by the Mayans called Los Sapos. I saw a very faded depiction of a woman giving birth, checked out the special stone configuration where Mayan women sat to give birth, and looked at a large frog carving. One of the guides told me that they say if you sit on the frog, you’ll have lots of kids, since the frog is the Mayan symbol of fertility. He figures he’s going to have a whole bunch since he sits on it all of the time! (I didn’t try it out.)

After my canopy tour, I was dropped off back in town, where I took a brief trip through the children’s museum, ate an excellent sandwich—a baguette with cream cheese, bacon and avocado—and went to my favorite Copan coffeshop, Cafe San Rafael, where I drank a wonderful moccachino. The place is picturesque beyond belief...you walk in there and feel an instant sense of calm. The smell of coffee roasting settles over you as you slide into a wooden chair, deliberating if you should buy a piece of the rolled pastry cake in the glass case. The two tables and long countertop on the right side overlook the owners’ enclosed front yard, full of green bushes and flowers. A great place for a descanso.

I met back up with my friends in the late afternoon for drinks before dinner, which proved much too much for me to handle on an empty stomach. I alternated between dizziness and extreme tiredness during dinner due to my happy hour overzealousness, but I managed to rally for the beer pong tournament we attended at a bar in Copan owned by a 23-year-old Californian guy. I was the goofball who spent the rest of the night sipping water from my nalgene—I very much enjoyed my role of professional beer pong spectator. It was all quite bewildering at first—there were debates about bouncing and blowing the ball out of the cup, leaning over the table, when the beers must be drunk, when re-racking takes place, etc. I never knew that there were such intricate—and evidently, partially regional—rules for the game! I did understand, though, that the random Honduran man who started sipping from the water cup used for rinsing the balls was definitely violating universal beer pong etiquette.

We ended up going to Papa Chango’s when the bar closed at 12, meeting a few other nice people over there, including a Yale medical resident who spent a good deal of time helping a friend understand the differing symptoms of dengue and malaria and alerting her to signs that someone is really, really ill. He advised us that the traditional Honduran medical treatment of a shot of antibiotics may not be great for future public health, but is actually pretty darn good at knocking out most bugs that might afflict you down here. I got to dance along in my chair to some favorite American and Honduran hits, such as my fav Estas de Miedo. Around 3 we headed back to the bar for a smaller-scale beer pong, round 2. As a result, we barely had time to grab some breakfast this morning before our ride back at 11 am. But it was a really fun night and well worth it—even if that curvy trip back down the mountains of Copan was relatively miserable in the midday heat after sleeping only a few hours and some solid hangovers on the part of my friends.

Unfortunately my welcome back home was a huge pile of laundry to be done so that I’d have clothes to wear to school on Monday. But all my stuff is currently drying and now I just have to pull together some stuff for school tomorrow. I might wake up at 5 to do it. I’m a bit exhausted, but I’m in a good mood. Here comes Bimester 5—the last one!

Ricas Baleadas!

Passing by the Bodega Mabel at 7 am on Sunday, a market regular would have noted a new addition to the retail landscape: a crowd of ninth grade bilingual school students selling baleadas.

We had intended to assemble at 5:30 am, but when I arrived at 5:31, the only other person there was a fellow teacher. Students trickled in for the next hour, with two of the students with the most important components—the beans and the portable gas stove—arriving last, and only after several cell phone calls. There was quite a bit of chaos in the assembly of the operation..... “Do we have a table?” (We took a laundry room picnic table that was in use as an ironing board.) “Sugar? Milk?” (Students sent out to buy.)

Then there was a minor issue with the actual tortilla making—when we tried to fold the first tortillas, they cracked. The boy of the duo who had made the masa immediately avowed responsibility—“I just brought all the ingredients”—and the girl involved just shrugged her shoulders and bought the first cup of coffee. But several mothers quickly swung into action to help out, and with the addition of some more flour, the consistency was greatly improved. My fellow teacher and I wanted to help make the baleadas, but we were only allowed to be in charge of supervision and the money. As one student said rather untactfully, “But miss, if you make them they will be deformed! People will not buy them!”

Our first potential sale turned out to be a non-sale, since the waiting couple who had approached requesting two baleadas became discouraged when they realized that the beans were not even on location yet. (They were being heated nearby at a students’ house.) When asked to wait by an excited student, they turned away in disgust. Ah well.

Fortunately, the students ran off to grab the beans, which were indeed hot, and the mothers began to turn out quite perfect circles, so we soon had a steady stream of baleadas being made—not necessarily in the most efficient way, but slowly and surely. (It went much better once we sent someone to buy plastic wrap instead of messing around with plates—and that was all the better for orders to go.) While the students were not aggressive about hawking the food, enough people approached us to keep the sales going, and we sent out groups of students with five at a time to sell them to folks along the main street and in the heart of the market. I don’t have any proof that they weren’t just taking money from their parents and pitching the baleadas in the gutter, but they did return every time with the correct amount of money!

The limeade, made fresh from limes growing at one of the students’ houses, was N.’s personal project and made for the most enthusiastic sales of the day. Three boys traipsed around the market with the huge blue cooler, yelling to everyone to buy their limonadas. In less than an hour, they had sold out. If we do it again, we will definitely have to include that as one of our main products. Coffee, however, was much less successful.

There were so many beans remaining around 8:30 when the tortilla masa was all used up that the mothers urged us to send students for more ingredients to make more tortillas. They whipped up some more and sales continued to be pretty brisk, despite our slowness at bulk orders. I did feel savvy when one man ordered five and we asked him to go about his shopping in the bodega and then swing by on the way back for his food. He did just that and I was happy to be prepared to give somebody their food without a scramble for once.

Around 9:30, we sold our last baleada and closed up shop for the day. All together, the students had earned about 1,000 lempiras, or about $50. The money the students are raising is going towards a pre-graduation trip to Roatan—the first ever, and possibly first-annual? While the students tired at times of the venture, they were really excited to have sold so many baleadas, in defiance of some parental doubts, and suggested that we do it again some other time. Okay, maybe not next Sunday, they amended, but perhaps the one after that.

It was great to see them working as a team, and so even though it was an early wake-up, I was glad to have been there for it. I think it was fun for me and for them to be a part of the Sunday morning market action. It also helped me put in perspective what a typical Honduran life is like. Our town feels so suffocatingly small to me that I forget sometimes that for many other people, from the mountains, for example, this is actually a big place. Tons of families make a big trip here on Sundays to buy the food they need for the week—stacks of corrugated cardboard filled with eggs, sacks of flour and rice, bunches of vegetables.

Exam week starts tomorrow, and then we enter into our fifth and final bimester. I’m feeling ready to be home in the States, but I’ve got at least 2 ½ more months of soaking up all the Honduras experience that I can. While I’m very worn out at this point by life here, I’ve also been feeling a bit more connected to some members of the community, which is really nice. (I do love having a cafecito after school.) After the school year ends, I will possibly be traveling around for a while...if anybody has any interest in some Latin American adventures in July, definitely let me know.

Live update from Antigua

Today started at 5:20 am when I woke up with a start in a grungy guesthouse in Antigua, unable to recall my alarm going off at 4:45 am, groggy, the drums that proceed Semana Santa processions beating nearby, the only thought in my head: I´m going to miss it all!
A friend and I pulled on some clothes and ran outside in the half-dark to join other sleepy procession devotees. We raced past five or six sawdust alfombras, or carpets (which we saw people just beginning to start making at 11 pm the night before) and quickly spotted the purple robes of the men who line the parade route in the hundreds, a honor guard of sorts for the Jesus and Mary statues that would pass by, the backup singers of the float-carrying band of Catholics. The float-bearers were dressed as Roman soldiers, complete with matching leather sandals and staffs with metal points, and they swayed from side to side as they struggled to heave the heavy float, with Jesus and his cross perched atop amid thorns and ferns. Women dressed in black with black mantillas on their heads followed, carrying an equally formidable float that held a statue of the Virgin Mary, beautifully dressed in a blue cloak and looking quite serene despite the hundreds of vueltas around the streets she was about to undergo. As the sun came up, the crowds dissapated, off to breakfast and to prep for the continued processions throughout the day.

At Bagel Barn I ate my first bagel since I´d been in the States in January and, enamored of the cream cheese, actually licked the last remaining bits out of the bowl in which it was served. Then my friends and I headed back to our room for a nap. When we woke we grabbed some lunch at a place that offered to let us screen a movie of our choice in a little back room. We watched ¨Chocolat.¨ It was an excellent break and we emerged rejuvenated and really in the mood for some good chocolate, which we later failed to find. However, the puffy fried balls of dough sold on the street--like munchkins but bigger and more deliciously glazed--sated our hunger for sweetness.

In the afternoon, I visited the ruins of the church on the main square, the destruction wrought by an earthquake in the 1700s. It was so peaceful--and free of people trying to sell me things, which is rare here. I´ve begun to think that all churches should have open ceilings. I suppose it´d be a bit inconvenient, but seeing the sky out of those large portholes in the desolate nave was really beautiful.

Walking back to the parque central to meet my friends, I cut through the present-day parish church, commonly referred to as a cathedral but evidently not actually one, and came upon crowds watching a statue of Jesus, formerly hung on a cross on the steps of the church, be incensed and blessed before being placed on an inclined bed on top of yet another huge float. A large group of men, dressed in black robes this time, hoisted it on their soldiers and left the church, beginning yet another procession through town. At that point, all of the alfombras had long been trampled, the colored mix of sawdust and pinebranches and fruits and flower petals shovled into dump trucks that follow the processions along their routes. But crowds still lined the sidewalks and street corners to see the statues go by.

Tonight the plan is for a relaxing dinner, drinks at the Irish pub here (we were there last night briefly but left shortly after the power went out), and then packing up for our bus ride back home, which begins at 3:30 am. I don´t think going to sleep is part of the plan. Blessed Good Friday, everybody.

Awesomely informative blog entry (with apologies for excerpting from emails)

In March, my small town here in Honduras began to feel like the latest tourist destination. We’ve had tons of visitors, with more to come in the upcoming weeks.

Parents come on down. My parents came the last week in February and brought with them a cornucopia of food, including batches of homemade chocolate chip cookies for the families we’re closest to, a case of instant oatmeal, tea bags, and granola bars. It was really great to have them here visiting me—now they know what it’s really like for me to be down here. It reminded me that even though I’m used to everything at this point, it is a strange and more difficult existence that we lead down here...I felt like a superhero, speaking more Spanish than them, plus being used to nonflushing toilets and sporadic power outages. My dad brought a whole bunch of 3-D pictures of the moon, Mars, and some of the other planets, as well as some 3-D glasses, so we hung up the pictures in the library and gave some ‘tours.’ The little kids loved it—were totally entranced by the 3-D moon pictures in general, since they can recognize it—and were incredibly adorable sporting the glasses. My mom brought down a heart model and gave a bit of an explanation of it to the older kids and talked about heart transplants, which they found really interesting.

We went on a weekend trip together to Copan Ruinas, where we saw the Mayan ruins—amazing, even though I’d seen them once before—and visited a bird park full of toucans and parrots and other really cool birds that are native to Honduras and other parts of Central America. We had an especially authentic experience because the water and the electricity went out while we were out eating dinner on Saturday night, and did not return until the next day. I asked at the beautiful bed-and-breakfast where we stayed if I could have a bucket of water to flush the toilet, and the guy offered to do it for me, but I explained to him that it was quite all right, that actually I have a lot of experience with this. My mom and dad also went on a mini-trip while I was in school to a forest called Pico Bonito, where they ended up fording a river and doing a rather strenuous sounding hike. But they were very proud of themselves for navigating around alone with their limited Spanish, and seem to have enjoyed the adventure.

School successes. In the combined 7th/8th grade, we just finished a unit on poetry and had great success writing haikus and other short poems and coming up with some great similes and metaphors. The ninth graders have been practicing how to write outlines in preparation for a research project that will enable them to start writing historical fiction stories. We’ve also been focusing on both grades on prepositions, since they are especially troublesome for nonnative speakers, and reading some great novels. Raven’s Gate, a mysterious story about an orphaned boy, has been a particular hit—I’m so excited to have reluctant readers coming to me at recess to discuss what might happen next in the book. I’ve arranged for an organization called Junior Achievement to come give personal finance classes to the middle school students, and we start next week. I think it’ll be great to give the kids a solid practical background in how to save, using a checkbook, and navigate the Honduran bank system.

Overall my students have been relatively rowdy in the past few weeks, although the ninth graders had an impressively calm and engaged discussion of Raven’s Gate on one of the days that my parents were visiting, which made me proud. Recently, though, I did really enjoy watching the seventh and eighth graders rocking out to Hey-Ya as they worked on their book projects, including a magazine devoted to Abby Hayes and a short play based on Sideways Stories from Wayside School in which students are turned into apples.

College visitors show their strength. We had an awesome group visit from Claremont McKenna who were a great help in the classrooms and also nearly finished building bathrooms for the kinder and prep students. The sun has been fuerte recently, as we enter spring, so they’re to be admired for continuing to work away at mixing cement, hauling blocks around, and digging ditches. We have another volunteer group coming next week. Our nonprofit’s director also visited this past week and it was great to have her here. She even convinced some of her SIPA friends to vacation in Roatan and stop over in Cofradía to check out our school. Hanging out with them felt like when you’re in high school hanging out with college kids—you really want to be as cool as them. They were kind enough to talk about their experiences at SIPA and even critique our resumes for us.

Public Policy Jobs? The search for new teachers for the 2007-2008 school year has already begun, and that means I’ve begun to feel the pressure of looking for a job myself. I plan to head back to the states—as much as I love the new friends I’ve made here, I’d like to be closer to my family and friends from back home. School ends around the last week in June, and I hope to stick around until July sometime to do some traveling around the area. If you have leads on jobs in public policy, let me know.

525,000 moments so dear. On a concluding note, one of our close Honduran friends had a frightening experience this week, and while everything turned out all right, it has definitely reminded the volunteer teaching team that all that we must be aware of our vulnerability, even as we enjoy the embrace of a community that is so welcoming and supportive. “Life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old by the rising and the setting of the sun.” Augusta Jane Evans.

Recoger elote

I picked my own corn today during a free period. It was a great field trip.

The father of one of my students was taking orders for manos (groups of five) of corn yesterday, and I took the opportunity to invite myself along to check out the operation. I wasn’t allowed to go in the corn field, though, because I was wearing a skirt and flip-flops.

Instead I got to be privy to an extremely amusing defense of a healthy diet on the part of another school father, who works with the owners of the field (who happen to also own pretty much all the land surrounding the school). This father has lost thirty pounds after some kind of cholesterol scare-speech from a doctor. He had lots of tips about not eating margarine, eating plenty of fresh vegetables and being careful about carb consumption (not eating spaghetti, rice and tortillas in the same meal, for example—a meal I have actually been served at school, on occasion with a platano substituting for the rice.) Even more humorous was the bemused look on the face of the landowner’s son, who’s my age. He became even more bemused when the diet maven declared that he had even (gasp!) given up beer.

At any rate, I was not deterred by lack of proper clothing, and vowed to wear legitimate footwear and jeans the next day, despite possible temperatures in the high eighties—“winter” in Honduras is stealing away. So today I went over and got a lesson, with the corn-agent parent accompanying me. Landowner’s other son looked boggled but gave the instructions to enseñarme how it’s done. We weaved our way into the corn field with a macheted man in rubber boots in the lead. The man pointed out that some ears of corn are too duro and won’t bend when you touch the tops. Others are more squishy and bendy, which shows they are good to pick. I ought to refer to the corn as elote—it was explained to me that elote is what corn is called here when it’s not “in a can like you eat it in the United States.” (I didn’t try to explain that I actually eat it on the cob there. Possibly some Hondurans think all Americans eat entirely out of cans. My dad suggested he could bring down an MRE and really mislead some folks about what we eat....that and the NASA dried ice cream...)

Here’s the technique: Grab the stalk right under the elote and pull down quickly on it to break it off the stem. It’s fun, at least when done in small spurts. I made off more than a mano, seven elotes (which the corn-agent turned ayudante kindly carried for me). Maybe I got a break for picking my own. I offered my assistance if they ever need a hand in the future. Somehow I don't think they'll take me up on it.

Class Notes

Today I more or less successfully implemented a rotation of English stations for pair-work. I’m always scared for some reason to do stuff like this, I guess because I know they don’t get along with each other and struggle to stay on task when unsupervised. But these were straightforward tasks and most groups held it together. The favorite station was definitely the study of concrete poems....I could see the lightbulb going on when they were figuring out on their own what a concrete poem was, and most jumped at the chance to try their own. Two students were really insightful about a poem about a football player that has the words dashing back and forth along yard lines on the page. One ninth grade student wrote about love again, and the specificity of her sentiments makes me think she has someone in particular in mind. Seeing her in that happy little haze made me think today of my favorite poem from early high school—a poem from the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe anthology called “The stupid jerk I’m obsessed with.” (It’s about the agonizing joys of fixation on a guy.)

I also did some more drilling with main idea—one of my goals of the bimester is to provide the students with helpful lessons in how to do research without plagiarizing—and then as a reward let the seventh and eighth graders do some self-portraits with my camera. They had grown increasingly jealous of the ninth grader’s self-portraits, which were taken before break (and developed in the States) and are now on display in the room in the frames they made themselves. My favorite is the frame shaped like a red high-heeled shoe. The others are more abstract (except for the star for the figurative “rock star”) but equally endearing. They all also wrote small poems about themselves and an explanation of what the picture does and does not reveal about them, now posted up near the photos.

Our paper mache globes are on hold because some people still have not brought in paint...I made that a requirement and alas I’m more or less stuck with it. Fingers crossed that the three paint-less students come through for tomorrow. We’re having a parents meeting tomorrow to discuss the possibility of contributions to defray the cost of materials for a Junior Achievement personal finance class for the middle schoolers. I hope there’s enthusiasm. I’m taking the lead on this, so I’m pretty invested in it....I really do believe it would be great for the kids to get that kind of practical knowledge.

I feel like I’m connecting more with students in the other grades, which makes me happy since so often, since the middle school is a building separate from the elementary hall, I feel a bit left out. I’m trying to remember the advice from Heat to be invisible and make yourself useful because it eventually pays dividends. In my case, I’m just looking to be more connected to the younger students. I helped out with a P.E. class today, and yesterday I spent a little time with a first grader struggling with some addition and subtraction problems.

Other events of today

Surely there have been interesting things that have happened since I last wrote, but today is most prominent on my mind, alas. And surely it’s in some way representative, at least of the good days! So here's what I did after school.... I walked home in the heat, cutting through some property (with permission) and waving to what I call the “garage door opener family.” They live in a house at the end of a long driveway, for free or at low rent, but always must be home to open the gate for cars entering or exiting. I always wish them “Buenas.”

I bought myself a mora slushy for 10 lemps (~50 cents) that was so-so and interrogated the teenager who sold it to me about whether there is a schedule for when they serve coffee slushies. (Not exactly.) I saw a police truck stop at a house down the small street around the corner from the house and a bunch of police who were riding in the back climb out, machine guns in hand, to grab some guy. That was a bit out of the ordinary. As I walked by the Aguas de San Pedro office, I noticed the water company's slogan today for the first time and chuckled: “Mejor cada dia.” Possibly someday even improved enough to drink. After chilling in the house and eating some Honduran cheese as a snack—queso fresco—I went running on the boulevard, getting a good deal of dirt in my eyes in the process and at one point even feeling the grit crunch between my teeth. One guy said, “la quemó!” (I was ahead of the friend who came with me.) I didn’t know that expression existed in Spanish. Evidently.

Then stopped by the grocery store and vegetable market with my friend just as they were closing up, since everything more or less closes when the sun sets. The woman at vegetable stand folks was super-nice and asked us about where we run and even offering her own experiences of running around town (that’s a rare thing, particularly for a woman). Quick walk home for a cold shower, some pizza that my awesome housemates made and kindly let me partake of, and some computer work before bed.

And so here I am, with kids in the street yelling “Que golazo!” since their schools are out of session so they get to play and play and play. Since I came back from break, I’ve noticed a lot more the casual friendliness and chattiness of people we encounter daily. I suppose I’m seeing the contrast with my life in New York. As I walk through the streets, I do get annoying comments and kisses from guys that I wouldn’t get in the States. But much, much more prevalent are the simple “adiós,” “buenas” or “buenos días” or “buenas noches.” It’s so wonderful and natural to converse with people you interact with in stores or say hi to people you pass on the street.

Oh, and did I mention that I spent the weekend sitting on a quiet beach called Tornebe? Awesome.

Some not-so-recent events of note

The Christmas concert. My small group of high-heeled seventh and eighth graders sang “The Magic of Christmas Day” and “Jingle Bell Rock” quite angelically. (The only boy in the group was a no-show, alas unsurprisingly.) The fourth graders I taught “Jingle Bells” on the recorder to were adorable and more or less played the right tune—once I was able to get them on stage. After their class performance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, they all mobbed Santa—one of their fourth-grade classmates—and knocked him over in his sleigh in an effort to steal his candy. I did have to play fairly loudly to guide them, but fortunately I was used to that light-headed feeling after three weeks of noisy lunchtime practices.

My middle schoolers prove that middle schoolers are universally horrible. By the time vacation came around, I was so sick of them I really couldn’t wait for vacation. There were only a few moments in my first four and a half months here when I let the thought enter my mind that I might not come back after Christmas, and most of those moments were in the final week of school before break. They were disrespectful to me, not paying attention, whining, hitting each other, calling each other names, trying to get off-task, not doing their homework, not taking notes, breaking classroom property and much more....not all of them at once, for the most part, but enough to really get me frustrated. During break the New York Times had an article about how adolescents are the plague of school systems and that all the reconfigurations—junior highs and middle schools and so on—have done nothing to fix the problem. I was glad that the paper of record could put it on the record that basically, when it comes to that age, you just have to remember that they’re inherently a struggle.

My last day reminds me (sort of) why I want to come back. On the last day, I insisted that they take their vocabulary test, which they had been annoyed about since Monday when I handed out the words. I reminded them that English learning couldn’t stop just because we were getting close to a break. Then I gave them a vacation homework assignment of three independent reading entries and three journal entries. (In retrospect, a poor idea, since it made this week a bit difficult—i.e. made them hate me—when some people just flat out did nothing and I had to get on their cases for it.) But after that, I let them more or less hang out and play games. Well, until at the end of the day they had to clean up the room and the yard right outside before I would give them their brownies. Food sure is a motivator... We watched some TV shows, played some games, listened to music and talked. Oh, and I let them throw water balloons at each other. I told them if they were responsible enough to remember to bring them in, they could throw them. Alas things got a little out of control and they started throwing buckets of water at each other. Of course, I ended up getting completely soaked and spent the rest of our final day of school seeking out sunlight in free moments in an effort to ensure that my underwear would eventually dry out. But even though a lot of times I’m no fun, I’ll admit it...I enjoyed getting soaked. The kids were at their best—they dropped the angst for a few minutes and just had a good time.

Goodbyes. I printed out some bilingual Christmas cards with a picture of Cusuco National Park as viewed from the window of the ecolodge there and the words: “Open the windows of your heart / And let in the light and peace of Christmas.” “Abra las ventas de su corazón / Y deje entrar la luz y paz de Navidad.” Then I went around handing them out to friends of ours here, mostly to the families who are friends of the volunteers each year. Getting that chance to talk to these people who we rely on so much for support and friendship was really wonderful. I was glad to be able to formally express my thanks to them. And when Dr. Z told me they’d be waiting for my return, I was really touched. Suddenly I realized that I have established relationships with lots of people here, even if I feel as if I should know them better at this point, that our relationship should be less superficial somehow. But even if our conversational topics are generally unexceptional, even if I’d like to get to know them all better in the New Year but don’t know exactly how to go about it, I felt really known. It was a good way to leave. And it gave me an odd premonition of what leaving for good will be like....how we’ll have these same small moments of goodbye, but

Christmas and New Year’s. I celebrated with family and friends, respectively, in New York. It was awesome. In between I spent all my time relaxing, sleeping, or running around the city trying to meet up with all of my friends. It was so, so, so wonderful to see everyone and talk with everyone and share stories and photos. That made it hard to choke out to everyone that the next time I would see them is (gulp) six months from now. I didn’t sleep much that final week at home, knowing that I would be headed back here to Honduras.

But here I am. More soon.