Suzanne in Honduras

I have returned

2007-09-01T01:15:00.000-06:00

My blog continues:
www.suzrepatriates.blogspot.com

Today is My Last Day in Olanchito

2007-08-04T16:53:00.000-06:00

The last two years have been an unimaginable experience. It is impossible to know ahead of time how a place will change you while at the same time reveal to you the most enduring, stubborn parts of yourself.

Before she left Olanchito on Tuesday, my German apartment-mate of the past three months, Fabiana, helped me make a list of the things that we have learned, and haven’t learned, during our time here in Honduras.

Learned To:
• Wait
• Make tortillas (Fabiana)
• Eat greasy, salty food daily and not worry about it
• Do nothing, and not feel guilty
• Still think logically while working outside in 100-degree heat
• Take 2-3 cold showers a day as the only way to cool down
• Only take cold showers, no matter what the weather
• Sleep soundly despite crowing roosters, barking dogs, screaming neighbors and loud music at all hours of the night
• Scratch mosquito/tick/scabies/sandfly bites until they bleed
• Handwash a week’s worth of laundry in under an hour
• Value the multifunctionality of a good pair of plastic flip-flops
• Survive for weeks without chocolate
• Navigate Olanchito by bicycle and navigate the country by public bus
• Spend time at friends’ houses as the major form of entertainment
• Look forward to a siesta after lunch
• Appreciate a plastic rosary as a valid fashion accessory
• Need to slick my hair back flat against my head in order to feel presentable before going out
• Constantly regañar (speak in a tone of mock horror and disapproval about the actions of) friends to show affection
• Play Honduran card games
• Speak Honduran slang
• Not be bothered by PDA in clubs and VPL everywhere
• Dance (and sing along) to reggaeton
• Party like a Latina! (stay out until dawn and still have energy to do it again for the rest of the week)
• Start the day at 5am (not after the party nights)
• Resign myself to untimely and unexplained power, water, Internet, and cell phone network outages
• Wear skirts and tight clothes and like it
• Assert myself as a professional woman in a machista culture
• Be a jealous girlfriend
• Accept mens’ chivalry
• Not need material gifts as expressions of friendship

Never Learned To:
• Ride double on a single-seated bike
• Make tortillas (Suzanne)
• Like Honduran beer
• Not feel embarrassed about eating carne asada with the etiquette of a dog
• Not be annoyed by the daily running commentary made by men on the street about the passing women (i.e. me)
• Do the Honduran campo yell that carries for a kilometer
• Participate in the multiple-times-daily campo coffee-drinking ritual
• Stick my face directly in a stream to take a drink of water without using my hands
• Fix a car, or do anything else useful, with a machete
• Date a Honduran man

The “learned to” list is longer than the “never learned to” one, so I would have to say I’m satisfied. Even if most of my newfound skills have dubious applicability back home, at least I will look back one day and remember that once I was Honduran.

...When You´re Having Fun

2007-05-29T19:41:00.000-06:00

Tonight I was in the mood to have friends over for dinner. Last week I was busy helping Alfalit host a successful visit from a student chapter of Engineers Without Borders. All weekend I was in Ceiba for Carnaval. And last night I spent quality time with Sandrita since she’s home from university on a short vacation. After all that running around, tonight would have been the perfect night to catch up with my four fellow single 20-something volunteer girlfriends here in Olanchito. A night when I would make my specialty, Italian food (well, um, spaghetti and garlic bread), and we would drink a bottle of bad wine (the only kind of wine you can buy in Olanchito) and revel in single-20-something-volunteer-girlness. A “rotic” night, as Christy likes to call them: romantic without the man.

But Christy is sick with the stomach flu. Leah teaches dance classes Tuesday nights. My new German apartment-mate Fabiana is in Belize for the week. And my French friend Elisabeth is in Tegus figuring out her visa. That’s what happens when all your friends are foreigners – they’re usually either sick or traveling.

No matter. I bought a baguette (French culinary tradition has indeed infiltrated this far, even before Elisabeth or former French volunteer Stephanie arrived). I made the spaghetti, er, pasta primavera. I did not buy the wine, since Christy is really the big bad-wine drinker. I’m more the bad-whiskey drinker. But no whiskey tonight, I just made the food and pulled my plastic chair out on my porch to get out of the apartment’s heat and enjoy the twilight. In the blue-greying sky, no clouds moved. Strangely for this time of day, none of my neighbors nor their kids were around. My landlord’s air-conditioner hummed dully. I savored the garlic in the pasta sauce that I had made particularly well. Compliments to the chef, Leah would have told me. In the distance I watched a warning light pulsate redly at the top of a cell phone tower. I heard water dripping out of the spigot of my pila.

There’s nothing like listening to dripping water to make you realize how slowly time is passing.

Officially, my last day as a volunteer is August 12th. I will do a little bit of traveling in the country before I fly back to the States on September 1st.

Will those dates ever come?

Will I ever have time to listen to dripping water once I leave Honduras?

Heaven

2007-05-02T18:03:00.000-06:00

It takes a bit of effort to get to and to work in the campo. By bus or by truck, on foot or on horseback, the medium of transport may differ, but the method is always the same: Leave Olanchito early in the morning. Spend hours bumping across the mountains over a lot of dirt and rocks (optimistically called a road), through streams and past numerous villages before arriving at the village you’re looking for. Wait around for the person who was supposed to be waiting there for you. Have coffee in a few people’s houses while waiting. Eventually meet up with whomever you were supposed to meet with and discuss work for half the time that it took you to travel there. Then do it all in reverse and don’t expect to get back to the city before dark. My six coworkers at Alfalit, who are dedicated to various types of rural development projects in 30 different aldeas (small towns or villages) surrounding Olanchito, live this routine six days a week, including Saturdays. I generally only do it once every week or two, mainly because I am not allowed to ride on the motorcycles (per PC restrictions) that my coworkers usually use to reach the aldeas and so I have to wait until I can reserve Alfalit’s only truck for my work. It usually works out alright, as I need office time to work on the technical aspects of my water projects anyway. But I admit that the most interesting part of my work here are the visits to the campo. And yesterday’s visit to La Gloria to evaluate a potential water source for a new potable water system was certainly one of my most interesting campo visits.

I left Olanchito at 7 am with Wilfredo and Marcio, two Alfalit agronomists, in the Alfalit pickup truck. We drove for an hour along the northern border of the Aguán valley, past the aldeas of El Chaparral, Nuevo Mendez and Juncal until we arrived at El Coyolar, where the dirt road ends in the town’s soccer field. Saddled horses were waiting for us to continue the journey, but first we had to stop in on the town president and accept breakfast served by his wife. We each downed a few corn tortillas, two spoonfuls of heavy refried beans and a small piece of some type of deep-fried meat with coffee (actually, I declined the latter two) before heading out on horseback. As the smallest member of the party that included two men from El Coyolar to accompany us, I was inevitably assigned the shortest, boniest horse with a swayed neck and burrs and ticks matting its deranged mane. But I mounted gamely and we headed up the mountain in two groups. Marcio and I left on horseback led by Don Felix, the community secretary, while Wilfredo and Juan Angel from El Coyolar took a footpath. Wilfredo is in his mid-40’s and has a potbelly, but nonetheless is tall and strong and walks fast enough to be taken seriously when he says he is more efficient on foot than on horseback, so he and Juan Angel started up the shorter, steeper route that criss-crossed our path every so often. We rode up and up and up, through cornfields cut into the inclined mountainside and equally steep lush pastures where our horses stole bites of grass between steps. We rode down and down and down, crossing clear mountain creeks full up to our horses’ shoulders and passing through the backyards of the houses of the community of El Porvenir, which is also to share the new water system with El Coyolar and La Gloria. We rode up and up again, our horses competently scrambling over slippery rocks in the forested creek beds and arduously picking their way along snaking paths serpentining up the green but deforested mountainsides dotted with crops and cows. After nearly two hours, our horses heaved themselves up to the outskirts of La Gloria, where we tied them in the shade, and took the second cup of coffee of the day at a house with children and dogs running in so many directions so that I couldn’t keep track to count them all. As they drank their coffee, Wilfredo and Marcio and the men with us from El Coyolar joked around with the owner of the house, who for some reason wasn’t working that day. I joined in when I understood their rapid slang, but mostly I entertained the kids by taking their photos with my digital camera.

After almost an hour, we remounted and continued in our two groups until we reached the rest of La Gloria, an even more arduous half hour later. There we tied our horses in a group of trees near houses set so steeply into the mountain that they were nearly on top of each other. We were invited into the house of the president of La Gloria, where his wife served us juice and I tried not to think about where the water to make it had come from. Most mountain communities near Olanchito are lucky to have high quality creeks and streams that people can take advantage of even without a water system per se, but the way in which the water is handled once it is collected and carried to their houses always poses a risk for my inadaptable cranky gringo stomach. In any case, it is rude not to accept food or drink when it is offered, and I was incredibly thirsty from riding mostly in direct sunlight for almost 3 hours, so the juice tasted wonderful.

With the arrival of a second resident of La Gloria, we left the horses and walked en masse for another hour uphill to the water source. At just about noon we arrived at a 30-foot waterfall cascading into a small clear pool that emptied into a rocky creek bed. This was the proposed water source for the tri-community water system. I was impressed. I was feeling a little woozy from the heat and exertion, and at that moment I was grateful for the forgetfulness of my companions that forced us sit at the waterfall for an hour, waiting for someone to bring us the bucket that we had forgotten to take up with us to measure the creek’s flow. In the meantime we did some simple water quality tests using a field kit given to me by the PC, took an altitude measurement with Alfalit’s handheld barometer/GPS combo, discussed property rights in the watershed and brainstormed ideas about how to include the five houses that are part of La Gloria but are on the opposite side of the mountain. Given their almost total lack of formal education (one in four Hondurans is illiterate), I am always impressed that the people in these communities generally have good ideas about how to design their future water systems. But then again, they have lived in the mountains their entire lives, and as children have carried water with their mothers from the local creeks to their houses, so their topographic and hydrographic knowledge is much completer than mine could be after only a day’s or even a week’s visit.

We enjoyed sitting in the light mist of the waterfall for an hour until we finished our measurements, and then we headed back down to La Gloria. I was still feeling a little dizzy (by this time I was thinking that I was dehydrated or suffering from lack of food) and had to walk slowly so as to not make a misstep off the narrow the mountain path. But no one was in a hurry, and in fact our four campesino companions were having such a good time talking to Wilfredo and Marcio that I was the first one to arrive back in the community. While I waited for the others to arrive, I introduced myself to the women in the president’s house and watched two 15-year-old girls trade off pounding rice with a big mortar and pestle to remove its shell. When the whole group had come together again in the house, we were each offered an enormous plate of boiled green bananas, oily rice and boiled chicken in a tasty orange-colored sauce that probably included Coca Cola as an ingredient (as many tasty orange sauces here do). Given my nausea I couldn’t eat very much of it, and I had to apologize to the president’s wife so she wouldn’t think I didn’t like her cooking, but I was consoled to see the leftovers fed to four skinny dogs and a kitten that had been painfully kicked out of the kitchen numerous times by the president’s 8-year-old son while we had been eating.

Tired, still dizzy, and with my mind set on home, sometime after 3 pm we remounted for the trip back to Olanchito. Off we rode, down the mountain to do the whole trip in reverse, but this time with heavy rain clouds settling into the narrow valleys around us. The first big raindrops hit just as we reached the house on the outskirts of La Gloria where we had stopped for our morning coffee, so we tied up the horses once again and took cover under the porch to wait out the storm. The rain came quickly, and I considered that its pounding on the aluminum roof drowned out the possibility of conversation between the six of us travelers and the ten women and children that had also taken temporary refuge with the same neighbor. But Hondurans love to talk and talk loudly, and Wilfredo and the other men kept up a steady stream of jokes and stories for an hour and a half as the rain poured off the roof in thick streams and turned the bare front yard into a huge mud pit, attracting all of the nearby pigs who splashed and rooted about gleefully. Wet dog after wet dog came in from the storm, snuck onto the porch and curled into a tight ball to sleep, until I counted as many dogs as people in our growing crowd. I tried to appreciate the humor in all of it but was quickly getting exhausted and found it hard to initiate or participate in friendly conversation. So I sat on a pile of firewood by myself until I was invited into the kitchen, where five more women and children were sitting around doing just as much nothing as those on the porch. I swung a boy in a hammock and made a meager attempt at being friendly with the women, but I was relieved when Wilfredo came in from the porch and told me that we had better leave even though the rain hadn’t stopped, or we wouldn’t make it back to Olanchito that night.

At just before 5 pm we untied the horses and started herding them down the mountain in front of us in a light rain. It was now too slippery to ride so we all walked, rapidly becoming completely soaked. The horses were tired and hungry, and became more adamant about stealing bites of grass when we weren’t slapping their hindquarters and vocally urging them on. We all slid down the muddy trail together, and I was becoming more and more focused on my apartment in Olanchito and how much I was going to enjoy taking a shower when I got home…but first we had to stop at someone’s house in El Porvenir to hand out friendly collection notices to farmers who had accepted loans for fertilizer from the federal government. Of course we couldn’t just hand out the notices and leave; custom requires that any conversation for business or pleasure must be accompanied by a cup of coffee. So out came the coffee pot again, and the little bags of instant coffee (have no illusions that Honduran coffee is either homemade or good, and I quote my coffee connoisseur friends), and what seemed like another hour passed while I pouted on the front steps as everyone else drank coffee inside. I was now completely fed up with being stared at by children and ignored by men, utterly drained from walking and riding all day and now in the rain, and from trying to be alert in my second language for nearly 12 hours straight. I cursed Hondurans for feeling so comfortable in other people’s houses when all I wanted was to return to my own. I cursed them for being so human as to want to intersperse work with rest throughout the course of a long day. I cursed my North American mindset that doesn’t allow me to change gears every other hour and doesn’t let me rest from work until I have completed it.

When the coffee was drunk we headed off again, this time riding because the terrain wasn’t so steep. But now that my clothes were completely soaked, the saddle sores that had been developing on my inner thighs quickly rubbed raw and I had one more thing to curse: the poorly-made Honduran saddles that are just a few pieces of leather on the horse side, tied with string or rope to a few pieces of plastic on the human side, with lots of uncovered knots. But still, we had another hour of riding to go, so I tried not to sit too woodenly and allow the horse to do its job while not moving my legs too much. We rode up and down the mountain from El Porvenir to El Coyolar, crossing the same full creeks that were now much fuller with rain. I stretched my legs in front of me alongside my horse’s neck as we crossed, but my boots filled with water anyway. I had to giggle out loud at the ridiculousness and intensity of it all, and on the horse in front of me Don Felix turned and smiled back at me.

We arrived in El Coyolar at just about dark, and once again we had to sit in the president’s house and drink coffee, this time with a side dish of boiled yuca, both of which I once more rudely turned down because I don’t like either and was too tired to pretend that I did. I waited as patiently as possible on the porch, my wet clothes chilling me more with every minute, while Marcio and Wilfredo ate inside. All of the neighbors stared at me from their porches, and many sidled over to find out who the three of us were and why we were visiting the community. I was too tired to be polite and ignored or stared down anyone who looked as if they wanted to make conversation, not-so-subtley encouraging them to gossip amongst themselves about us rather than bothering me with the same questions I had been answering all day. I know by now that getting work done in this country is as much about human relationships as it is about technical competence, but I still don’t have the stamina for the politics and don’t try to. I leave that to my Alfalit co-workers, who are experts at it from a lifetime of coffee breaks.

After another half hour we waded through the crowd gathered at the door and said the appropriate goodbyes, thanked the president’s wife for her generous hospitality and got back in the pickup to drive back to Olanchito. The president squeezed into the truck with us to get a ride into town, and I was suddenly grateful it had rained so hard because he didn’t smell like sobaco, the slang word for the armpits-feet-butt smell that unwashed hitchhiking campesinos often overwhelm a truck cabin with. He had probably just taken his first shower in days under his gutter during the storm. During the entire hour-long ride back to Olanchito I desperately wanted to sleep, but couldn’t for being so cold and wet and for all the jolting along the dirt road. For that I had to wait until I got back to my apartment, where I peeled off my clothes, finally took that shower I had been thinking about since noon and dropped into bed.

In Spanish, the word “la gloria” is one way of expressing the concept of heaven and the rewards that await the deserving of us when we pass on. For inquiring minds that want to know, la gloria is only one hour by car, two hours on horseback and one hour on foot up a mountain on the north coast of Honduras. If you can stand all the coffee breaks, you might just get there someday.

The Origin of Species

2007-04-15T17:16:00.000-06:00

It is so easy here to feel like I have been plunked down on some strange planet inhabited by another species, albeit human-like. This species here looks the same as the species I grew up with, but confusingly interacts completely differently, lives under a very different set of values and and depends on a completely different type of support network to get by. But as different as they may be, they have accepted me and called me their own. Their adoption of me as been so complete that I have come to think that maybe, after all, I am really originally one of them, but was maliciously kidnapped and left by a spaceship on the planet with the other strange species where I had previously thought I was born.

I have developed a whole new set of desires and needs here, like wanting to get married and have kids right NOW and to live in the same place for the rest of my life so I can enjoy a stable community and never travel anywhere ever again so that I stop getting sick and homesick. I feel completely inadequate sometimes for not having any family here and not even being able to enjoy being linked with the extended family of a husband, not having a house to call my own and not having a big enough butt. I have forgotten the so-called benefits of my decades of education and travels and network of friends all over the continent. All I want is to be just like everyone else here, settled down with a family and a local job and a hired trabajadora to hand wash my laundry and cook lunch for me and my husband and kids every day.

I am scared to be returning so soon to the place where all of my new (or repressed and only recently valued as they should be?) needs are going to be misunderstood, ignored or impossible to satisfy. Where according to my new criteria, the boyfriend who has loved me so well for so long, and whom I am still going home to because at one point he embodied my most important values, is suddenly substandard because he has no family nearby to share with me, wants to live in a few more foreign countries before settling down, and doesn´t want kids. Where I will step off the plane and immediately upon arrival feel my life return to an uncontrollable fast-forward that will never again be possible to enjoy.

A thousand thoughts go through my mind every day about how things might be when I get back to the States. Many are bad, like the intimidation of jumping back into the job search after being out of the professional circle for 2 years, and having to start all over again no matter where I choose to set myself down. But I also think about visiting with friends that go far far back, like many of you reading this, and about possibly traveling to New Zealand with the friends I met there 10 years ago to celebrate our 30th birthdays. I think about basking in a mild sun that doesn´t bake me to the bone every time I step outside. I think about moving back out west and being able to hike every weekend. I think about going to yoga classes and swimming in a pool again. I think about how much more normal I will be as a 30-year-old never-married single woman with no home and no children, and how being that average again might allow me to relax back into the values that served me well in an earlier stage of my life. I think about how easy it will be to find healthy, clean food in the grocery store. I worry about how easy it might be to forget my farmer friends here who work 14-hour days to get that food from their farms to the market for export.

And I also wonder: how soon will I be able to return to my new homeland, Honduras?

Small World

2007-04-12T10:57:00.000-06:00

Easter week means vacation in Honduras: buy your bus tickets in advance (this is one of the only weeks in which Hondurans plan ahead); starve your sweet tooth in preparation for being bombarded with every fruit imaginable bathed in a taste-erasing boiled sugarcane syrup. This is the hottest time of year and the closest you’ll get to summer vacation in Honduras, so squiggle into your bikini and head to the beach, or just go to the nearest creek with the rest of your neighbors and jump in fully clothed. At some point you’ll probably get forced into attending one of the week’s daily and nightly vigils honoring the religious celebration that gives the week its name, Semana Santa, but soon enough you’ll be back to the front yard, the bar, the bottle, laughing and lounging and dancing with family members in from out of town and old high school buddies home from college.

Beach excluded, this is pretty much how Hondurans celebrate every holiday, so I decided I wouldn’t miss sitting through it again in Olanchito and I skipped town. First I went with my new site mate, Christy, to Comayagua, a colonial city close to the capitol that is known for its extravagant Good Friday procession. We met up with four other volunteers there, Robin, Gabe, John and wife Deb, and camped out in several very nice rooms in the Hotel America, complete with a great view of the entire city from our fourth floor suite. We got exactly what we bargained for when we woke up early Friday morning to see the main streets covered with painstakingly designed colored-sawdust “carpets,” made solely to be trampled shortly thereafter by a sweaty crowd heaving an immense Jesus-on-the-cross. I particularly liked a carpet that was made not of the traditional fluorescent-hued sawdust but rather of natural materials including unroasted coffee beans, pine cones, flowers and (what else) beans and rice. It turns out that Good Friday carpet-making is neither Honduran nor Catholic, but instead is an indigenous Mexican tradition that became popular in Comayagua as recently as the 1950’s (perhaps a Guns, Germs and Steel explanation of delayed cultural dissemination along a north-south continental axis can be applied here). I saw basically the same thing in El Salvador during Semana Santa last year, so it wasn’t as exciting as the first time, but it was still nice to be a part of a celebration and to spend time with other volunteers.

I left Comayagua to spend the rest of the weekend with Robin (coincidentally BMC ’01) in La Esperanza, a town a few hours away that sits at the highest elevation of any major city in Honduras. In two days Robin and I packed in a long walk with PCV Cristal and another gringa teacher friend Susan (who has been in Honduras since 1995), lots of Sex and the City reruns, a movie, and a trip to Robin’s site, Yamalamadingdong (or something similar that I never can remember), where I met her host family and we made mud pies with her two little brothers. We also witnessed the inevitable wind-down of Semana Santa at the market on Easter afternoon, where one drunk vegetable vendor lazily threw his rotten strawberries at another more-drunk vendor passed out on his own vegetable wagon across the street, and where yet another drunk had collapsed in a doorway with his perkily painted ice-cream cart nearly on top of him. Jesus Saves.

Next stop: La Ceiba. By Monday afternoon I had made it back to the north coast via always-sweltering San Pedro Sula, and I dedicated the next two days to the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, the only place that I have found in this country where I can do what I spent 7 years at university and earned two degrees training for: hydrology. It is nothing short of a relief to walk into their office and be recognized as the scientist I am. I also dropped by the majority of the American expatriate establishments I frequent, stopped in on Max and Lynnette, and took advantage of Cuero y Salado president Pepe’s inexhaustible hospitality by staying for the umpteenth time in the guest bedroom at his house in the hills above La Ceiba. I finally decided to head home yesterday afternoon, and luckily caught a ride with Luis, the head of Alfalit (the NGO I work with), back to Olanchito.

Living in Honduras has a way of making the world feel small. In a single week I squinted the blowing dust out of my eyes in blustery Comayagua, curled up on the couch watching movies to escape a chilly night rain in La Esperanza, and spread-eagled with Max and Lynnette in their inflatable pool to beat the relentless heat of La Ceiba. I found other volunteers everywhere I went, and even when alone I managed to run into friends, like my second night in La Ceiba when I walked into an empty gringo bar and the only other person there turned out to be a Honduran acquaintance from Olanchito.

However, I still know that spending time with other volunteers, when traveling doesn’t make me too sick to seek them out, is the only way I can completely relax here. This automatic comfort I feel in the company of other Americans makes me feel like a traitor to the Honduran people who do so much to make me feel welcome in their homeland. From them, I have learned when to gossip and when to converse impersonally. I have learned to talk for much longer periods of time about much more mundane things than I ever did in the States, and in the process have gotten to know Honduras and Hondurans much more intimately than I know some of my own family members. I have been the beneficiary of uncountable lunches and dinners, three birthday parties and an infinity of small gifts. And so I feel ungracious to want to go home as badly as I do now. To feel so tired of getting sick, of being stared at on the street, of my work being entertainment at best but more often counting mostly as charity that only reinforces the existing laziness and corruption. To be so tired of being foreign.

Honduras is small, but I am wishing that the world were even smaller. Then I could be a little closer to home. My Honduran friends could know that home and understand me better. And I could get a little comfort injection now and then to relax me and give me the patience to continue to love Honduras.

Don´t Try This at Home

2007-03-24T17:48:00.000-06:00

Just for entertainment, as I was sitting around bored today I decided to list all of the illnesses I can remember having here. For added interest, I have also included in the table below how and where I got each one. Keep in mind that aldeas are small rural villages, usually without electricity or water treatment systems; Olanchito, Choluteca, San Marcos de Colón and Siguatepeque are typical Honduran towns of 40,000 – 100,00 people; La Ceiba is a much wealthier, very Americanized city of 100,000; and Tegucigalpa is the cosmopolitan capital city of 2 million people. Diseases are not necessarily in the order in which I contracted them. (scroll below for table, there´s a bug in the HTML code, sorry!)

Illness	How contracted	Where
Giardia and roundworms	Bus food	On the bus between Choluteca and San Marcos de Colón
Allergic reaction that swelled up my entire face and neck and also made me red and itchy	Didn’t listen to my friend Dave when he told me not to cut open a raw cashew from a tree we were sitting under. I later found out from my bio-dork friend Joshua that cashews are in the same family as poison ivy.	Choluteca
Stomach amoebas	Cold food	Water system inauguration in an aldea outside Olanchito
	Cold food	Nice seafood restaurant in La Ceiba
	Unhygenically prepared raw vegetables	My favorite taco restaurant in Olanchito
	Unhygenically prepared raw vegetables	My favorite lunch place in Olanchito
	Unhygenically handled brownies	The French bakery in La Ceiba
Stomach amoebas and a viral stomach infection	Unhygenically prepared raw vegetables	An aldea near Tegucigalpa where I made a salad with fresh lettuce picked from a friend’s farm and I didn’t chlorinate the water I washed it in enough. My (Honduran) friend didn’t get sick.
Some combination of amoebas, giardia, roundworms and viruses (at least another 2 times aside from those listed above)	As of yet undiscovered sources	Olanchito
Eye infection	Sat in an extremely smoky bar for 5 hours straight	Olanchito
	Cleaned my contact lenses with dirty water	Aldea outside of Tegucigalpa
	Dust	Olanchito
Female unmentionables (at least 6 times, no STD’s)	Antibiotics	Inevitable result of the medication I take to treat every bacterial infection I have had
Depression (on and off)	Lack of exercise, lack of work, too much work, boyfriends, excessive attention from strange men, excessive solitude	Olanchito
Strep throat (at least 3 times)	Lack of sleep, stress, travel, alcohol	Olanchito
Cold/flu (at least 3 times)	Lack of sleep, stress, travel, alcohol	Olanchito, Tegucigalpa, everywhere in between
Cold sores (uncountable number of times)	Lack of sleep, stress, travel, alcohol	everywhere
Athlete’s foot (3 times)	The damp climate	Olanchito
Mosquito bites	Sat outside for hours in sandals with uncovered ankles	A friend’s country house outside Siguatepeque
Tick bites	Bushwhacked through the forest along uncleared paths	Aldea outside of Tegucigalpa
Scabies	Slept in someone else’s (not well-kempt) bed	Aldea outside of Olanchito

If you have counted carefully you will at this point question if I have really been sick at least 29 times (that I can remember), which would require me to have been sick more than once a month for my entire two years, and perhaps to have suffered frequently from two or more ailments at once given that each one lasts about a week. The answer to that question is yes. But although I have caught a lot of the classic tropical diseases, at least I can be grateful for not having experienced the worst of them (knock on wood, I still have 4 months left!).

Instant Blog Feedback

2007-03-21T17:05:00.000-06:00

Last night I attempted to chat with my well-traveled friend Steph in Japan, which was a minor adventure given that chat only works about 4 hours a day in the Internet cafes in Olanchito and that the time difference between Japan and Honduras is something like 12 hours, including a cross of the International Date line. Miraculously we did end up online at the same time, and although we couldn´t chat we were able to exchange a bunch of rapid-fire emails. Steph gave me perhaps the fastest ever commentary on my recently posted blog entry:

Steph in Japan: you live with toucans and parrots? that sounds like a caricature.

Suz in Honduras: well, not in olanchito, but in the campo it´s like that. a lot of people have parrots in cages because they´re so easy to find. they steal them from the nests when they´re babies. it´s actually sad to be hanging out near the birdcage (usually somewhere outside, like on the porch) and to hear a flock of wild parrots fly by...the caged birds become silent and listen like they´re hearing the first thing they´ve understood in years.

Steph: there are lots of birds in cages in indonesia too, as there's this list of 4 things every successful household is supposed to have... you know, a woman, a sword, a songbird. i can't remember the 4th.

Suz: awesome, i like being in the same category as swords and songbirds. unless the fourth item is good toilet paper. though that is also a necessity of life, as i have learned here the hard way.

Being Campesina

2007-03-18T17:53:00.000-06:00

I have been working a lot in the rural communities lately. This work has included evaluations of old drinking water systems, topographic studies for new ones, and small farm management, not that I know anything about farming. I have been working mainly in three communities, two just outside of Olanchito and one near Tegucigalpa. These are communities of 300 people apiece, set high in the mountains at the ends of deteriorated logging roads. As the crow flies, each of these communities is close to a major city where people live with all the modern amenities. But government funds don’t climb the steep green mountains to reach the campesinos. One community drinks water from an unstable system of cheap garden hoses that leads from a creek. Another community’s water source is heavily contaminated by runoff from the large ranches above it. The third community enjoys good-quality water, except for three months of the year when it dries up. Only one of the communities has access to public transportation; residents from the other two communities have to walk two hours down the mountain to reach the nearest bus stop. None of the communities has electricity or a health center.

But what these communities lack in infrastructure is made up for in other ways. Due to their elevation and the shade from their forests, the mountains are cooler than the big cities below. People live farther apart in the campo than in the city, and so malaria carriers like mosquitoes can’t find breeding grounds as easily and don’t bite while you’re trying to sleep at night. Almost no one can afford to buy a car, so exhaust and the dust kicked up from dirt roads are minimal and the air is clear and feels fresh in your lungs. Small family farms border tropical forest where toucans, oropendulas and parrots call all day long. The pace of life is slow and there is always time to chat with whomever you pass on the road, always time for a cup of coffee with your neighbor in the afternoon, always time to be late wherever you are going as long as you eventually get there.

I don’t idealize the agricultural mountain lifestyle. Having spent nights in campesino homes, I have been woken up by women rolling out of bed at 5 am to stoke the wood-burning stove and begin the tedious daily two-hour process of grinding corn to make tortillas. For his part, the campesino man must tend to his farm every day, making vacation time a nonexistent and irresponsible luxury. And I know very well that the richest resource upon which the farmer depends, the naturally fertile land that he clears out of the forest, is endangered by inadequate farming practices that almost guarantee low crop production, leading to deforestation as people move farther up the mountains to clear more farmland to feed their expanding families.

Still, there is a certain elegance to living in a place with a panoramic mountain vista constantly in sight, a place where people know a use for the bark, leaf, flower or root of every plant in the forest, a place where the processes of consumption, growth and decomposition form their own fuel cell and don’t result in global contamination and economic inequality. Above all, my feelings while I’m in the campo reinforce my suspicion that I was assigned the wrong fate when I was born a sheltered suburban girl destined for a desk job. Although I have put up with such work for the sake of having an income, I know that the office is not my calling. My continual struggle is figuring out where to find work that is outdoors at least half the time and involves a lot of interpersonal interaction, yet still allows me to put to use the technical skills that I have worked my entire lifetime to obtain.

Suggestions?

Innocent Abroad

2007-02-18T16:36:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I finished reading a travel book that left me shaking my head with astonishment and laughter at its witty and spot-on perceptions of the American experience abroad, particularly in the Third World. Here are a few short excerpts:

On the American superiority complex upon arriving in the Third World:

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreamt-of old towns, wedded to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly unaware that the world turns round! And perfectly indifferent, too, as to whether it turns around or stands still. They have nothing to do but eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a friend to stand by and keep them awake. They are not paid for thinking – they are not paid to fret about the world’s concerns.
…

On picking up local habits that you once found disgusting and that will offend your friends and family when you continue to use them even after returning home:

Very many of the young women are exceedingly pretty…We are gradually and laboriously learning the ill manners of staring them unflinchingly in the face – not because such conduct is agreeable to us, but because it is the custom of the country and they say the girls like it. We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off…The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.
…

On America’s greatest fault:

Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some time, enjoying other people’s comfort and wishing we could export some of it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home…in America we hurry – which is well; but when the day’s work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which [here] they call a man’s prime.
…[but] day by day we lose some of our restlessness and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people. We grow wise apace. We begin to comprehend what life is for.
…

On returning home:

We felt as though we had been away from home an age…Oh, the rare happiness of comprehending every single word that is said, and knowing that every word one says in return will be understood as well!
…

On the necessity of leaving:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
…

This book could have been written about my life here in Latin America in the early 21st century, but actually it was written in 1867 by Mark Twain as he traveled around the Mediterranean. The location and time are different, but the cultural contrasts between pre-industrial and industrial nations remain the same. As do the feelings that travel evokes. Little changes in only 150 years.

I’m Still Here

2007-01-28T20:45:00.000-06:00

If I haven’t written, it’s not really because things are out of the ordinary. Since returning from Christmas vacation with my mom and brother in Roatán and Guatemala, I’ve been doing the usual, making the office rounds and getting sick. I’ve done a bit of proposal writing and (gasp) surveyed part of a water system. I suppose I will admit to one difference, but only one: what has changed is time.

It’s not like before, when I would do anything to distract myself from the fact of having too much of said entity. Since being a volunteer precludes becoming a workaholic, I’ve tried other innumerable solutions to the problem of excess time. I’ve read a dozen books in a single month, or spent all my waking hours with Sandra in her family’s pulpería (corner store). Blog writing has been an occasional comfort but not a reliable way to stave off the ill effects of too much solitude, as reflection can have a way of reminding me of the worst as well as the best of myself and my life.

But now, if I haven’t written, it’s because time has been moving too fast rather than too slow, because suddenly I am stumbling over that heap of work that always materializes just when I was preparing to wind down. Of course, with that rapid passage of time comes the contemplation of what’s next. I confess that since last fall I have been planning my escape from Honduras, scheming of side trips in Mexico on the way home and dreaming of free time with long-missed friends once I’m back. But now that my Change Of Scenery date is a nearly daily conversation topic with friends, co-workers and bosses alike, I am gripped with a sudden fear: that I Am Not Going To Like Being Home. Everything will be expensive. I won’t be able to strike up a harmless conversation with a stranger without being regarded suspiciously. I will hear too much about the big problems of the world and not enough about the small ones. I will get cold!

I’m getting way ahead of myself, I know. But I’m already thinking that maybe I should extend my service past the beginning of August when I’m scheduled to end. I’ll only need a little more time to get my nascent projects on their feet, maybe three more months. That way I’ll know that I’ve made some real progress and will feel good about leaving. I guess.

Ho, ho, ho

2006-12-24T19:30:00.000-06:00

Once again it is Christmas time in Olanchito and, just like last year, I’m still here. Just like in the States, for most of the past month people have been going to work but haven’t really been working, instead passing their time in the office gossiping and dropping hints about what they want from their Secret Santa. Of course the Christmas bonus is discussed, as is the number of times you were almost assaulted in broad daylight by petty thieves trying to steal it from you as you walked home from the bank. The number of 100-lb bags of flour your aunt bought to make holiday cakes to sell to all of her friends, and the quantity and types of livestock to be brought into town from your cousin’s farm to be slaughtered for the holiday dinner also pass as Christmastime office talk.

And holiday cheer is surely in effect on the streets of Olanchito. “Feliz Navidad” has been playing on the radio since, well, late October. Christmas lights are up in the central park and on the houses around town. Cattle destined for dinner struggle hog-tied in the backs of pickups on the highway into town, their resigned tails drooping over tailgates.

Remembering how fun it was to spend last Christmas with Sandra’s family, and knowing that I will see my mom and brother in just three days when they come to visit, it feels good to be here. I accidentally missed the nacatamale-making-fest last night with Sandra’s mom, aunts and grandmothers, but that’s OK because always rip the banana leaves anyway. The rest of the festivities start tonight at Sandra’s house with members of her family visiting from all over the country, and I’m armed with more than 50 tissue-paper wrapped little bags of candy I spent all of yesterday preparing. I took a nap to brace myself for staying out until nearly dawn. I even know to have a pre-dinner at my own house so I can hold out until midnight when dinner will really be served.

Somehow I have already been gifted a fruit cake, yes, that dense, questionably edible brick-like American tradition that even comes in a brick-colored Claxton wrapper. I can’t choke the stuff down, but one is always skulking malevolently around my family’s house in the States this time of year and I almost shed a few tears of familiarity upon receiving it. The tears almost came again while walking down the street today as I was suffering the sticky streams of sweat running off my face in the 85-degree heat. I sweat like that every day here, but it’s Christmas, for god’s sake! But even so, for Christmas this year Olanchito is home.

My 15 minutes of fame

2006-12-20T16:34:00.000-06:00

Today I was interviewed by telephone here in Honduras to be on the radio program "Intersection", to be broadcast on WETA 90.9 FM (Washington DC area) between 11am and 12 pm EST tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 21st. Intersection will be featuring the new Peace Corps director as well as me and several other volunteers from around the world. I hope those of you in the DC area will tune in and listen! The show will also be available on the Internet in both Windows Media Player and Podcast formats after the broadcast is over.

********************

Update 12/22/06: Thanks to all of you who listened in! For those of you who are still trying, here´s the mp3 file. I come in at about minute 23, but of course the whole show is worth a listen.

Possibly the best description yet of how I spend my days in Olanchito

2006-12-04T20:52:00.000-06:00

Another unplanned day, and therefore another difficult day to get out of bed. The winter morning rain didn’t help, nor did the thought of confronting my landlady again about the mysterious $100 fine that appeared on my electric bill in October and which we have been arguing over ever since. Tomorrow the rent is due, I thought to myself while holding onto the last molecules of warmth in the sheets. Time to talk to her about deducting the fine from the rent. My blood pressure rose at the thought of another one of our near-yelling matches that we tend to get into over things that I consider a landlord’s responsibility and that she considers not worth bothering with. Such things include replacing missing windowpanes and repairing major plumbing leaks. They also include paying electric meter maintenance fees in a timely fashion so her renters don’t get their lights cut off, as mine were last October after she repeatedly “forgot” to pay the charges.

I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep so as not to think about it for another few hours.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself all day, anyway. I had work to do, finishing translating into Spanish the proposal I wrote to NOAA for the Fundación Cuero y Salado (FUCSA) last month. But with more sleep still on the horizon of my hazy mind, I didn’t think too hard before coming to the conclusion that I could put it off another day since I wasn’t going to Ceiba until Thursday. And what about Alfalit? I thought guiltily to myself. Supposedly I’m working full-time with them now, instead of with SANAA. Which generally is a major source of relief, but is also currently one of frustration since the head of the office, Luis, cancelled his first appointment with me in three months last Friday. Granted, he has been out of the office due to back surgery and the subsequent physical therapy. I should give him a break. But he cancelled our meeting the Honduran way: by not really ever canceling, just leaving a message with his secretary that he was “coming in later.” That always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially because at some point in the past month I was asked to get involved in a construction project with a Canadian group on Sunday, and I was waiting on him to give me the details since the secretary didn’t know much and, it being Friday, no one else was in the office.

Forget Alfalit, I thought, and pulled the covers over my head.

Sometime mid-morning, I realized that I could see blue sky out my bedroom window and that I was bored of pretending to sleep. Suddenly awake, I set myself to sweeping and mopping my entire apartment. With all the dust that enters from the dirt road passing my apartment complex and the constant construction my landlady is having done on seemingly all sides of me, this is no small feat. Further distracting myself from more pressing tasks, I took a long shower and dressed myself in much nicer clothes than a Monday afternoon with nowhere to go warrants (Hondurans are perpetually overdressed and I have picked up the habit). By early afternoon I was making myself an uninspired peanut butter with peanut butter sandwich. And that’s when the day really picked up.

First, my companion in música de recuerdo, 70-year-old Don Israel, showed up ringing his bike bell at my window. As our now-infrequent routine goes, I lent him my guitar and he played me boleros on my front patio while I ate my lunch. I even tried to sing a few, but my voice hasn’t quite recovered from that throat infection that lasted almost the entire month of October. Even so, he complimented me and offhandedly remarked that there was going to be a singing contest in the Casa de la Cultura this coming Saturday. When you get back from working in Ceiba, he instructed, let me know so that we can rip apart all those other contestants! Then he left to give a guitar lesson to some doctor’s son over by the hospital, and I accosted my landlady as I saw her leaving her apartment. Determined not to get in an argument like the last time we discussed the light bill, I asked her about her family, and her business. She complimented me on my earrings. Things were going well. And they continued that way, as I let her exclaim on for awhile about how poor she is since she has to manage her business debt, and the debt she has accrued in building a new tourist-oriented restaurant right outside of town, and the debt she owes for the construction of her new, very nice apartment right above mine. I nodded and sympathized with her dire situation of being the most responsibility-laden lady in the entire town, and said so little that eventually she talked herself right into paying the oversize light bill, though she first insisted vehemently that she has no connection to the $100 fine. Of course you don’t, I asserted indignantly, and kindly added, and I am happy to help you pay it by deducting just a quarter of it from my rent for the next four months. She didn’t look happy but didn’t get any more upset, and that was that. Until tomorrow when she will say she doesn’t remember a thing about what we discussed today.

Now breathing much easier and in a good mood from the music, I set off on a walk. I wasn’t sweating by the time I reached the front gate to the apartment complex, so I decided on a longer loop than usual, one that passed by the post office where I checked to see if a long overdue package had arrived from my parents. Nope, still no package, the post office ladies said, looking up from their romance novels. But then the mail didn’t come today, either. Why not? I asked, and they just looked at me blankly, and so I answered my own question with, I guess sometimes it just doesn’t come, huh? They nodded agreeably. Have you gotten the cold that’s going around yet? they asked me, sniffling and coughing demonstratively. I had it the whole month of October, I said. Ah yes, it’s terrible, isn’t it, cough, cough? they replied.

From the post office I headed toward the center of town, not knowing where I was going next but sure to run into some reason to be walking. I passed my ex-sitemate’s ex-neighbor Rosa’s brother’s carpentry workshop, and shook the brother’s hand as he idled in his front doorway. Nice to see you, we said to each other. How’s Rosa doing in La Ceiba? I inquired. She’s there, he replied, the Honduran way of saying she’s fine, nothing’s new, or I don’t know. I still am not a good judge of when that expression has which meaning, so I let it drop. How’s the workshop? I politely tried to extend the conversation. Great, he said. Now that everyone’s getting their holiday bonuses, I have a lot of orders. I noticed for the first time how tall and well-built he was, and how muscular his exposed upper arms were, and how much more my age he looked since the last time I saw him. And what about your work? he interrupted my inadvertent perusal of his body. I briefly mentioned FUCSA, feeling my voice wavering as he looked at me with that innocent-inquiring, raised-eyebrow, pupil-burning very-purposeful stare that Latino men use when looking intently at women. Especially married Latino men with small children (and ex-cons and ex-boyfriends). I said goodbye just to get away, demurely shaking his hand again, and continued down the street.

By then I decided I was headed for the Casa de la Cultura to ask about the Saturday singing contest that Don Israel had mentioned. The CdC is not known for its event publicity, so I figured I was going to have to ask if I wanted to find out anything about it before Friday afternoon. I walked into the director’s office to find the reluctantly appointed new director at his desk, diligently reading a proposal opportunity. Heber Sorto is a local poet who introduced himself to me at an Internet café awhile ago. We were not fast friends, as some of the things he has said to me have tried my patience with their pessimism. But now that he is being forced to manage the CdC by himself, without funding nor employees, he is doing a much better job than the previous elderly (now dead) absentee director that was his uncle. Still, I know that he feels very alone in his work, and so I quickly adjusted the mission of my visit to be to buck him up as well as to get information about Saturday.

In fact, my visit ended up lasting almost two hours. Our conversation ran the gamut of his experiences with trying to accomplish anything of consequence in his town over the years: insufficient organization, political pressure and backstabbing; lack of money, lack of equipment, lack of community support. An overwhelming spread of difficulties for anyone, but what he was saying to me wasn’t new. I have experienced it, in trying to get a water system built and a computer lab to function. And since I have experienced it, I expected him to say all of it, and I listened. I didn’t anticipate changing Heber’s mind about anything, but my one goal of the conversation was to not let it degenerate into a 2-hour bitchfest. It didn’t. We ended laughing, both of us feeling reinjected with a dose of positivity just from having talked. I had suggested some ways to start a process of getting more community support for the CdC to take some pressure off Heber, and he had responded with interest if not exactly faith. When I finally asked about Saturday’s event, he looked at me strangely and said there was no event planned for Saturday. I let it drop and headed on my way again.

Now it was 5 pm and the sun was setting. I walked halfway around the central park from the CdC and entered the old Catholic church for a moment of meditation after my discussion with Heber. I sat on the back bench next to the portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe who reminds me of New Mexico, and thought, I am really living here. I was once told that you can’t help another person with their problems until you feel those problems yourself. And if I am doing anything here at all, I am feeling the problems. I had thought that my frustration with trying to work here in Honduras had more to do with the shortcomings of my own institution in placing me with a nonfunctional counterpart, or with my own North American rapid-paced over-ambitiousness that is completely out of sync with the lifestyle here. Instead, what I am experiencing as an average professional gringa here is exactly the same as what the average professional Honduran experiences his entire life.

I left the church wondering where to go next, settling on the Internet café since it was only a block away. Without expecting it, I saw a sign outside the café, saying “The Best Singers of Honduras, this Saturday, Hotel Olanchito.” Keeping that in mind, I checked my email, posted yesterday’s blog entry, and decided to drop by the Hotel Olanchito a block away. When I got there, the woman at the front desk had no idea who was supposed to be singing on Saturday, nor if it was an open competition or simply a concert. Come back tomorrow at 7 pm, she sluggishly told me with her eyes on the ceiling mounted TV in the lobby. The guy you need to talk to will be here then. Which guy was I to look for? I asked, unsuccessfully making contact with her eyes glued to the set. The guy in charge, she said in monotone. I got the hint, with those two questions I had squeezed out every last drop of information she had. So I left.

It just so happens that the Hotel Olanchito is only half a block from Alfalit, and as I went down the hotel steps I saw that even now, at 6 pm, their office lights were still on. Ha HA, perhaps now I would finally run into the man who stood me up on Friday. I walked a little more quickly, toward the office. Yes, Luis’ car was parked out front. Score. I approached the front gate. It was locked. No one was visible inside, though the door behind the gate was wide open. Good evening, I said loudly but well below a yell. No answer. GOOD EVENING I just about shouted this time. Still no response. I looked around for the loudest noise-making material handy. The metal gate itself. I banged it raucously with my fist. Elina the secretary appeared from the back room to let me in. I had arrived near the end of the bi-monthly all-hands meeting, and was happy to see Luis in person for the first time in months, sitting normally in a chair with his small team around him. Upon my taking a seat, Luis dedicated nearly the following hour to talking about my pending (now pushed off to January) projects with Alfalit and about what a wonderful addition I am to the team and how the whole staff should work with me. Which made me feel great, but also guilty, because I could see that everyone else was bored stiff when I got there, and my presence had subjected them to another 45 torturous minutes of lectures from the boss. In any case, everyone put up with it valiantly, and they all smiled with me when Luis invited me to the staff dinner later this month.

After the meeting ended, I could have gone to Sandra’s, since her house is only two down from Alfalit. But I knew she had already left for her evening classes at the Uni, and besides, I was tired. It had been a productive afternoon.

Love Thy Neighbor

2006-12-03T20:02:00.000-06:00

It was raining when I woke up for the first time this morning. Which for me is an automatic, almost biological downer and excuse to go back to sleep. So I slept for two more hours until 9 am and finally forced myself out of bed. For no reason, really, except that I was overcome with a suffocating loneliness that strangles not at the throat but in the heart, and I knew I needed to get out of the house before it got intolerable.

Once I dressed and breakfasted, it had stopped raining and the sun jumped into the sky from straight above. The dirt road leading from my apartment to the center of town luminesced the way only dirt roads can after a rain, gently steaming and puddles aglitter. I wandered about without a mission but tried to give myself one: first to the supermarket to buy a liter of milk, then to the street market to buy two melons, and finally to the park to just sit. But thinking of yesterday, I was too restless to stay in the park, and I was also too restless to meditate in the church in my usual spot on the back bench near the Virgin of Guadalupe. I headed for home, dreading the emptiness but not thinking of anyplace I could go in the whole town where I would feel better. The situation was getting desperate: today was going to be one of those days that I wouldn’t be able to distract myself out of the cruelty of solitude.

But without really thinking, instead of turning downhill toward my apartment when I got to my street, I turned uphill, headed to my friend Rosa’s. I consider Rosa one of my best friends here, even though she can be ridiculously hard to track down and never initiates contact with me. She is middle-aged, divorced, and lives alone in small but compelling house that she artistically decorates with tchotchkes sent to her from the States, driftwood, long colored scarves and shells picked up on Roatán. The best part about her is that she always welcomes my visits as if I were her best friend since childhood, even though I have only succeeded in catching her at home four times in the past year and a half.

Rosa and I can talk about anything and everything. And even though we do, I really don’t know that much about her. She is too good of a conversationalist for that. But I have known since I met her that she is a master of propagating the friend-making tradition I will call the Honduran lovefest.

The lovefest starts small. It begins with a simple gift, usually given while visiting. Today, for example, I brought Rosa a melon. Before I knew it, I was eating an entire lunch of rice and meat and vegetables, with melon juice. And melon licuados (milkshakes) two hours later. And dinner, still at her house, two hours after that. Somewhere during that time I made a quick trip to my apartment just to pick up some cookies to give her in a meager attempt to settle the score.

I think the lovefest tradition is wonderful. The problem is that I always lose.

Another example from this weekend: Friday night I baked chocolate cake in my sitemate Leah’s oven (convenient now that she lives two apartments down from me). I made two. Leah thought this was excessive until I explained to her that each of us would use a cake as collateral in the required weekend lovefesting. Saturday came and I gave my neighbor Azucena some cake in the afternoon. Except that, being neighbors since April and Azucena also being an expert in the Honduran lovefest, she and I are way beyond exchanging single pieces of cake. Now the lovefest has escalated to the point where I not only gave cake to Azucena but also fed her husband, her laundry lady and her laundry lady’s daughter. So today, I came home from Rosa’s house and was presented with a large bunch of ripe bananas AND a nice set of Christmas lights for my front window. Azucena and her husband even put the lights up for me. So I whipped out the score-settling cookies again. (I hope Hondurans like gingersnaps as much as I do.)

Over the past few months Azucena’s other gifts to me have included a bag of 20 off-her-parents’-tree oranges, several immense bowls of seafood soup (a north coast specialty that I will never be able to reproduce once I return to the States), surprise plato típico dinners at just the right lonely moments and all kinds of unrecognizable sweetened fruit desserts. Of course she continues to gift me things because I do the same to her, such as tupperware containers full of hot oatmeal raisin cookies or frozen banana pie, pitchers of fresh-squeezed lemonade and guacamole. But still I know that I am not keeping up.

It’s not a matter of being made to feel guilty. It’s the opposite. It’s knowing that Hondurans are getting more pleasure out of seeing my delight at receiving than I am in seeing theirs. I don’t think that I have ever been to a place where I have seen people more genuinely pleased to be able to give something away, be it a small piece of cheese or a bucket full of mangos. Shameless, open-hearted giving is something either lost or unknown to most of American culture, where gifts are almost exclusively given on a particular few days of the year and their worth is carefully calculated to be less than or equal to what one expects to receive. In the States a gift reflects one’s ability to spend money, one’s supposed intimacy with the recipient, and one’s personal taste, all of which turn gift-giving a way to make or break one’s pride. Here in Honduras, no gift here is too small, nor too big. Gifts are not expected to answer a particular need or desire of the recipient; it is the simple act of giving without expectation of reward that is important.

While we were waiting for the cakes to cool on Friday night so we could frost them, Leah told me that the true measure of generosity is when it hurts. That reinforced my suspicion that I am losing the lovefesting because it seems too easy. But in general, though I don’t always know exactly what I’m giving here in Honduras, I do know that it hurts.

Another Typical Saturday

2006-12-02T17:36:00.000-06:00

Not much changes around here.

I had set my alarm early and heard it go off this morning, but didn’t get up until 2 hours later. I set dirty laundry to soak and did a half hour of half-hearted yoga. I ate a bowl of cereal and went out to wash the soaking clothes, though from the darkening sky I was sure it was going to be raining by midday and there was no way they would dry. I tried to hold up my end of a conversation with the older woman who washes clothes for my neighbor, at least pretending to listen while she told me about one of her sons who is in the hospital in San Pedro Sula with a broken arm, her friend who just died of cancer and the 24-year-old girl in her neighborhood with nine children.

At 11:30 am, the laundry dripping from the lines and the sky clearing, I dressed in my Saturday best and walked to the park to enjoy the milder-than-usual weather. I bought a few ripe mandarins along the way. When I got to the park I staked out an empty bench, less close to drunks and staring single men, on the far corner near the church (plus) and facing the street where my ex lives (minus). From where I was sitting, spitting seeds onto the ground as I pulled apart the orange sections, I couldn’t make out his name on the sign hanging in front of his family’s business, but I knew what it said: Merendero y Videojuegos Nan. The Snacks and Videoarcade (and general store/bakery/electronics repair) Shop named after him, the eldest son. And I felt sad. Despite the fact that as recently as last week he sent me text messages first of groveling apologies for his rudeness in September, which when not answered to his liking were angrily followed by teasing and offensive requests for explicit acts, I still felt sad anyway.

I don’t have a history of remaining friends with my exes. I can count two I still talk to. But it’s a lot easier to shut the door on someone when I (or he) move to a different town, or country. And seeing as we’re both still here, and have to awkwardly pass each other on the street with eyes averted on various occasions, I can’t help but still think of him.

I used to believe that I fell for him because of the fact that he’s intelligent, motivated, athletic and attractive. Sure, I admired him for all that, but really I became attached to him out of gratitude. He was the one who welcomed me into the Biblioteca Digital last October when I had no work and was bored out of my mind. With him I visited the local elementary and high schools while doing publicity for the BD. He took me to both universities where he studies, in Olanchito and in La Ceiba, to introduce me to people who might work with me on various projects. He even tried to get me a job at his favorite of his three workplaces, a high school with what he described as a great work environment. In a way, he played the role of community liaison that none of my PC-assigned counterparts ever have.

Sandra and her family have certainly provided me with the backbone of my social network in Olanchito, and that has affected my experience here profoundly. But it was really Hernán, though only 21, who has been my best professional contact in the area. Though I haven’t had the most professional success with opportunities presented to me through him, I have definitely met the most people.

So even though we have never succeeded in being on the same wavelength personally, and have often hurt each other out of pride and desperation, I dedicate this entry to him. Because the time has long past in which we trusted the compliments we gave each other face-to-face.

Winter

2006-11-21T16:30:00.001-06:00

Unlike last year, this October and November have been hot and dry. No hurricanes = no power cuts, no plantain shortages, no water system washouts. No stories. Unlike last year, I can’t say that I attended a Halloween party in a house on the Río Cangrejal that 30 of us had to evacuate in one passenger car and two pickups at 8 am the next day after 16 straight hours of rain. I can’t brag about catching a taxi to the supermarket in Ceiba that same day in calf-high water and seeing people wading waist-deep on the downhill side of some intersections we crossed. This year I may not have to describe Olanchito five days after a hurricane, with all roads into the city and the drinking water system washed out, and with no potable water, gasoline, propane or vegetables for sale in town. Nor do I have stories of Stephanie dropping me on my head at dance parties at Sandra’s house in the dark, the lights flickering on and off every ten minutes, nor of rationing, for two days before water started running again in the tap, the last 20 gallons of rainwater I had collected off my roof. I haven’t had to wait three weeks for the skies to clear so I can wash (and hang dry) my clothes. I haven’t had to close myself up in my house with nothing to do but a stack of books, waiting for Hondurans to get over their strange phobia of doing anything that gets them wet, including walking to work or school.

Well, until now. Since Sunday it has been completely overcast and severe weather warnings have been upgraded by the day (we’re now in Stage 4 here in Olanchito, and at a slightly more worrisome Stage 3 on the coast). It has been spitting on and off without clearing since yesterday, and Hondurans are bundled up in their coats and sweaters and ski caps, which I get a kick out of seeing at 60 degrees. OK, so even I am a little cold, but what do you expect in a place where no houses have insulation or even real windows to close, and everyone has the wardrobe of a Caribbean beachcomber? Personally, I find it a relief and I’m trying as hard as I can to shiver.

Primping for the Luau

2006-11-18T00:15:00.000-06:00

Sandra and Mérida
There comes a time when you realize you are in love with someone, or something: a person, a place, a culture. It has offered itself up to you, unfolded in front of you and you have accepted it and have done the same. And the moment that you realize you are in love is also the moment you realize that that love will engulf you, will tear you apart, will ask you to forgive its constant faults again and again.

And you will, just so that you can keep on loving.

A Slight Variation on the Daily Encounter with the Underage or Overage Honduran Man

2006-11-03T20:16:00.000-06:00

A nearly 29-year-old woman, Suzanne, is eating breakfast alone at an outdoor table in front of a diner in La Ceiba.

Boy, no older than 21 [pulling up in front of the diner on his bike and staring at Suzanne, speaking in English]: Hello. [a little louder to make up for Suzanne’s rudeness in not answering him] Hello-o. [She still ignores him. He is now practically yelling] Hell-O!

Suzanne [in Spanish, making a joke of boy’s rudeness for yelling at her by quoting the lyrics of a popular reggaeton song]: Deja el show!

Boy [smiles approvingly and flirtatiously while locking his bike to a fence in front of the diner]: Hello.

[Suzanne smiles but says nothing, continuing to eat the fried plantains and beans on her plate.]

Boy [looks one more time at Suzanne before heading into the diner]: Welcome!

[Suzanne feels like saying she doesn’t need a welcome, she has already been in the country for a year and a half, but lets the conversation drop and continues chewing.]

Boy [has come back out of the diner and leans against Suzanne’s table]: Yu espeek Espaneesh? I espeek Eenglesh. [pauses for effect]

Suzanne [making an effort to be friendly]: That’s great. Where’d you learn to speak English?

Boy: What?

Suzanne [giving him a second chance]: Where… did... you... learn... to speak… English?

Boy: Een dee eskool. Yu haf byooteefal nahws!

Suzanne: What?

Boy: Yu haf byooteefal nawhs! [seemingly changing topics] Oo-air ar yu frum?

Suzanne: [switches to Spanish] The States.

Boy [also switches to Spanish]: I think that most of the people who come here from the States and Canada have beautiful noses. Watch this! [wielding a blue ballpoint pen with his right hand, he holds up his left palm facing Suzanne and, with a flourish of the wrist, draws a single line representing the profile of her face]

Suzanne [pleasantly surprised by the show of artistic talent]: Very nice!

Boy [visibly pleased with himself, adds a femininely eyelashed eye]: Watch this! [draws what seems to be a mustache] And this!

Suzanne: Very nice! But you are drawing me to be prettier than I am in real life.

Boy [picking up on the hint]: No, no! You have a beautiful nose!

Suzanne [blushes, while years of low self-esteem caused by having a larger-than-normal nose fly out the window]: Tee hee hee!

Boy [still drawing]: What’s your name?

Suzanne [answering eagerly, caught off guard by the flattery]: Suzanne.

Boy [has written “Suzanne” in Gothic lettering underneath the now-completed profile]: See?

Suzanne [inspects his palm]: Wow!

Boy: I’m a tattoo artist.

Suzanne [notices a small blue-inked tear tattooed by the outside corner of his right eye]: Do you have any tattoos?

Boy: Yes… [Suzanne looks at him expectantly] Do you want to see it?

[Suzanne nods, slightly embarrassed to have asked]

[Boy pulls up a pant leg to reveal a faded Chinese dragon taking up most of his right calf]

Suzanne [not impressed but pretending to be]: Oh! Where did you learn to draw like that?

Boy [admiring the drawing on his palm]: In prison. I was there for a long time. There was nothing else to do there!

Suzanne [suddenly remembering that tear tattoos are only done in prison and signify either the number of years one has been there or the number of men one has killed, she can’t remember which]: Um…er, that’s great that you have a hobby!

Boy [innocently]: But everything has changed now. [stands up straight and looks back toward the entrance to the diner] I’m working now, so I have to go. It was very nice to meet you. [Flashes his eyes coquettishly and extends his hand for Suzanne to shake]

Suzanne [relieved to see him go]: Nice to meet you, too!

[They shake hands, and the boy goes into the diner. Suzanne quickly finishes her breakfast, and tries to slip unnoticed back into the diner to throw away her trash. The boy sees her as she is leaving.]

Boy [follows Suzanne out the door]: It was very nice to meet you…[Suzanne continues down the sidewalk as he watches from behind] VERY nice…

Suzanne [too loudly, revealing her discomfort]: Nice to meet you too! [turns around to look at him one more time while walking away, pretends not to be uneasy] Thanks for drawing me!

[The boy smiles and flashes his eyes one more time before walking back into the diner. Suzanne turns her back on him and walks away quickly, pretending she didn’t see.]

The After Party

2006-09-23T15:30:00.000-06:00

1 am smiles: Manfredo Suzanne Willito Leah Jaleni Modesto.

A friend recently posted on her blog her response to the question, “Now that you are ten years down the road, what advice would you give to your former self?” Though I liked her answer, I think the question is fundamentally flawed because it implies self-blame for the past, the complexities of which are readily understood with months or years of retrospect but really are much more difficult to distinguish in the moments in which it was happening to us. But even so, my thoughts were provoked and this is my answer:

Don’t sweat the first year and a half.

As I am discovering, that seems to be the amount of time it takes for me to adjust after entering a new environment. Adjusting to college and afterwards to San Francisco took much less time because of my immediate comfort with their social networks. But I virulently hated living in New Mexico for my first year and a half there, and I would say that my first year and a half in Honduras has been nearly as difficult (mainly made easier by the fact that I survived New Mexico). It would be far from the truth to say that every single moment of that time has been bad, because there have been many good times and I have learned so much. It is more a lingering sense of unease that leaves me constantly anxious and more or less depressed.

But I can name the exact moment in New Mexico at which I realized that I was happy there. And I think that moment for Honduras happened to me this morning. Just like the New Mexico moment, I was cleaning up my house after a party the night before. After-party-cleaning is the perfect opportunity to remember all the sweet/strange things that happened the night before, which I was doing this morning. It had been a simple party, just a dozen people that had been thrown together at two hours notice to celebrate the 21st birthday of Sandra’s cousin Alba. In fact, Sandra couldn’t stay for more than an hour because she was sick. But the rest of us played the only card game I have, Uno (which by the way confuses Hondurans because the way to say “one card” is actually una, not uno), took photos of each other with my digital camera, and danced to my somewhat deficient dance music collection. A year ago I would have allowed myself to be bored with how many times we replayed the same songs so we could dance to them again and with the million poses for the camera that mostly turn out ugly and have to be erased anyway. At one point in the night I looked over at the new volunteer here, Leah, who was sitting in a corner by herself, and I imagined myself a year ago doing the same thing: pretending to have a good time for awhile and then just giving in to boredom. But for me, last night was just fun.

As I was cleaning, I began to think about how I have been feeling pretty good here lately. I am happy with work I started this month with the Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge, traveling up to La Ceiba for two or three days a week to help them with a watershed management grant proposal that has to be in English. Then I began to think of other things that have recently and suddenly become clear to me in the past month. I went down the list with myself:

Interesting, productive, necessary work: check. New friendships with people I have a lot in common with in Olanchito and La Ceiba: check. Threatened long-term friendships in Olanchito rescued by staying away from former love interest: check. Evil ex-boyfriend returns to have a secret affair, is given a talking to and finally shoved out of the picture forever: check.

In my mind, the list began to expand to more general developments of the past year and a half:

Knowing exactly how to buy groceries at the dark, poorly run, hole-in-the-wall corner stores that used to intimidate me: check. Looking at the sky and knowing how many more hours until it starts raining: check. Feeling affection for my bed when I make it every morning: check.

My social lives in both Olanchito and La Ceiba are crystallizing. I am relaxing into the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants latino culture. And I have finally found a place for myself professionally. Nine and half more months to enjoy it.

Integrity

2006-09-02T05:30:00.000-06:00

I am cursed with what I want to hope is not uncommon among ambitious, mobile, verging-on-or-already-type-A people of my generation: not quite being able to place myself in this world. In the past 10 years, I have lived in two foreign countries and half a dozen different parts of my own, and have traveled to just as many other parts of the world. I have done this some times out of curiosity, other times seeking a unique opportunity. Both of these being justified by the feeling that I never belonged where I was born and raised in the first place. The Washington, D.C. area is too work-obsessed, too self-absorbed, too cosmopolitanly pessimistic for any happy person to live out their days.

A dozen changes in social milieu later, my work-oriented, inward-looking, well-traveled and easily disappointed self still doesn’t have much desire to return to the Beltway culture. But surprise, all these years around the world only confirm that it is hard not to get sucked into the culture, attitude or emotional state surrounding you, no matter how much you want to disavow it.

And so my question is: how do I develop what I consider to be positive traits in the face of forces trying to break them down? How do I stay open-minded in the face of closed-mindedness? Patient in the presence of impatience? Respectful when being treated with disrespect?

Young love

2006-08-30T20:30:00.000-06:00

This town is too f***ing small.

The First man I date here, and my work situation becomes hopelessly unstable to the point where I am forced to give up most of it although it is the only good work I have. I am now dating the Second, and my relationship with my best friend here and half of her family are thrown into uproar. First of all, I am dating one of her best friends and she’s suddenly, strangely jealous of me even though I would now count myself as one of her best friends, too. And then her oldest brother is upset, I think because he had thought that if I were to date anyone else in this country, it would be him. Not some barely legal lover that’s only a year older than his little sister. I don’t even want to know what their mother would say if she knew. No doubt something disapproving and judgmental, considering the difference in our ages (10 years) and the fact that she knows I have a boyfriend back in the States. Of course the Second knows, doesn’t care and it’s none of anyone else’s business anyway, especially since the boyfriend at home and I share a relationship that allows this sort of circumstance.

That’s right, nobody else’s business. I should never have told anyone in the first place. (But now that word is out, I’m going to go ahead and blog it.)

The other thing is that although I am excited to be dating someone new again, I am already experiencing the depths of insecurity that come with unexpectedly strong but unrequited feelings of commitment. A day passes without talking to my new lover, and I am thrown into a depression far more profound than my actual feelings for him at this early stage. I daydream of long talks and walks and hand-picked bouquets made of the flowering weeds growing by the side of the road. I want to be with him every day even though I barely know him. I have never been like this before.

I am more lonely than I thought I was.

I remember what it was like to be his age. I had no emotional strings to attach to anyone. I dated quite a few who were over 5 and up to 15 years older than me. I appreciated everyone I dated and had a good time. But more importantly, I had my strong network of good friends and preferred to spend most of my time with them rather than with any lover.

I am starting to understand why most of those older men I dated often seemed more into things that I ever was, even after a simple first kiss.

Supposedly as we age we grow some sort of shell or thicker skin or some other bio-emotional apparatus to protect ourselves. But I think whoever is a proponent of that has an overly sentimental view of youth at the expense of the even greater sentimentality of age.

Lolitos of the world, I am at your feet.

Speaking with Children

2006-08-15T21:07:00.000-06:00

I have thought before of writing about the topic of this entry. I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it in the past because, well, it’s a topic that’s not pleasant to discuss. But I find now that I have to write about it, or cry. I am choosing to write.

I saw it happen once before, in Stephanie’s apartment. We were eating lunch, me, Sandra, Jorge, Stephanie, her boyfriend Fernando and his 4-year-old son Xahil. Xahil was fussing and didn’t want to eat. Fernando, seemingly personally offended that his son was being troublesome, started speaking low and forcefully. “You will eat that food, Xahil,” he growled. Xahil squirmed in his seat and emitted a meow-like sound, something that sounded too much like “no.” “Yes, you will!” Fernando responded raising his voice, rapidly pulling his wide leather belt out of his pants and laying it across his lap.

This immediately brought Xahil to tears.

And so ensued a half-hour battle in which Xahil wailed, tears streaming down his cheeks, while Fernando forked food into his gaping mouth and flapped the doubled-over belt with raised arm at his son when the food threatened to fall out of his mouth.

Meanwhile, the first appearance of Fernando’s belt also upset me. At first I just stared at it. Then I made wide eyes at Sandra, who was sitting across the table from me. She stopped talking, but didn’t make wide eyes back. I looked up at Stephanie who was still cooking, and she was pretending like nothing was happening. Or like she saw this every time Fernando brought Xahil over to her apartment. I didn’t even look at Jorge, who is Fernando’s best friend. I prepared for the worst. Was I going to have to witness a child be beaten in front of me, in my best friend’s house no less? I steeled myself. If that happened, I would walk out, I told myself. Maybe Stephanie allows that from her boyfriend, with his son, in her apartment, but I am not about to watch it. I kept my eyes on the belt. I expected, hoped, that Xahil would start choking or vomiting from distress. About five minutes later, the rest of us aside from Fernando and Xahil still silent, Stephanie asked, “How come nobody’s talking?” “I’m just enjoying the music,” chirped Sandra cheerily. I had forgotten there was music playing. I said loudly, “I don’t know about Xahil, but that belt sure scared me.” There, I had said it. Everyone looked at me but Fernando. “That belt makes me nervous,” I repeated, Fernando still not looking at me. No one else said anything about it, and somehow conversation returned to normal as Fernando and Xahil battled it out on one corner of the table. When Fernando had finally finished force-feeding his son, he said triumphantly to no one in particular, “Look at that, Xahil finished all of his food before everyone else.” I looked up from my plate. “The belt ate that food,” I said darkly. “It worked, didn’t it?” he rejoined curtly. Jorge said something in an attempt to reply, something that came out like a joke about belts and wasn’t accusatory toward Fernando and that I didn’t find funny.

This scene repeated itself tonight, but this time it was at my dinner table.

Fernando and Xahil came over at the end of my weekly evening English lesson with Stephanie and Sandra. We weren’t hungry enough to eat dinner since we had been snacking all through the lesson on cheese and plantain chips. So Fernando heated some milk for Xahil, who had never asked for milk, and the rest of us ate a coffee cake that I baked for the first time here last night, a new victory now that I have inherited Lauren’s gas oven/stove since she got a job at the bilingual school in Tegucigalpa. Anyhow, the power went out and we all continued munching and chatting by candlelight. Well, Sandra and I were chatting. Xahil started complaining that he couldn’t drink his milk because it was too hot. Both Fernando and Stephanie started into him. Fernando made the usual threats. “You will drink that milk, Xahil, even if I have to stuff it down your ears. You hear me?” “No stuffing anything down ears in this house!” I exclaimed lightly. “That’s only allowed outside,” I pointed out the window. “No problem,” replied Fernando, “we’ll take it outside if necessary.” “You drank milk last night, Xahil, why won’t you drink it tonight?” chimed in Stephanie, exasperated by something that I didn’t see as all that exasperating. “You’re such a clown, Xahil,” she continued. “Those dramatic faces you make are worthy of the circus.” Xahil looked hurt, not amused. Sandra defended him, “He doesn’t want to drink it because he says that someone hit him on the lip today in school and his lip hurts, isn’t that what you said earlier, Xahil?” she coaxed. He nodded. “Poooor thing,” cooed Stephanie, suddenly theatrically sarcastic. “There’s always something that hurts, isn’t there? ‘My hair hurts,’” she intoned in a high, Xahil-like voice, trying to get the rest of us adults to laugh at him by reminding us of the time when Xahil had said that, under less duress. Xahil mumbled something non sequitir about cornflakes. Already feeling jumpy from all the verbal aggression and trying to steer toward a more benign conversation, I asked, “Do you like cornflakes, Xahil?” He nodded. Stephanie pounced. “Oh, so now you need cornflakes with your milk. Just drink it!”

And so Fernando started in again with the threats. Xahil said the milk was too sour. Fernando added sugar. Xahil still wouldn’t drink it. When I say he wouldn’t drink it, I mean that he wouldn’t pick up his mug and chug it. Maybe he would have sipped it slowly, bit by bit, if we had all paid more attention to our own food and not as much attention to him. I’m really not sure what Fernando and Stephanie were expecting from him. But out came Fernando’s belt again. I noticed him slip it out of its loops and onto his lap, even though he tried to be more subtle than the last time at Stephanie’s house when I had been so obviously disapproving. But what Fernando hadn’t noticed was that my vocal disapproval masked my silent profound distress at seeing someone else, particularly a child, be threatened with physical violence. He didn’t know that once I saw the belt, I could no longer hear anything going on around me and that every muscle of my body became strung with fear.

So tonight I slowly, deliberately, shook my head at him from across the table, not saying anything so as not to disturb Sandra’s and Stephanie’s conversation going on between us. Fernando shook his head back. “Yes, Suzanne,” he said forcefully. I looked at him directly. “The belt scares me.” Lowering his head, still shaking it but no longer looking at me, he replied, “Me, too,” all the while sliding his hands up and down the belt. I saw that he was not going to have anyone tell him how or how not to discipline his child. My voice shaking ineffectually, I wobbled, “Maybe in your house, or in Stephanie’s, but not here.” All conversation had stopped. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I didn’t want to have anything else to say. In fact, I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone for the rest of the night. I stood up and abruptly cleared the empty plates from the table and walked to the sink. Fernando took the hint, but he preferred to walk out over being kicked out. He dragged Xahil out the door so fast I didn’t even see them leave before I returned to the table to clear the rest of the dishes. “Goodnight,” I called after them, my voice steady once again. Stephanie called after Fernando to wait for her, she was leaving too. She and Sandra quickly helped me clear the table of empty glasses, including the mug of unfinished milk, and we all said goodbye with the usual kisses on the cheek. I told Stephanie I was sorry. But I was only sorry to have turned our friendship into a potential source of friction between her and Fernando. I was not sorry that Fernando had left, nor sorry that I had expressed how upset I was. I felt like I was going to lose all the cheese and chips and coffee cake we had been eating for the past two hours. I felt like crying. I cried.

In our moments of anger against children, do we lack patience? Do we resent their attempts at manipulation? Do we think that our children are making fools of us and of our ability to be adults? Of our ability to control them? To control even the littlest things of this world? How can we expect our children to speak their needs and desires clearly and respectfully to us if we do not teach them by being just as expressive and respectful?

Who befriends a foreigner?

2006-07-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

Another evening with the usual suspects: Sandra; the French volunteer Stephanie; her Honduran boyfriend Fernando, who is back in Olanchito on vacation from university; his 4-year-old son Xahil; and the ever-unpredictable Jorge, Fernando’s best friend, who not only accepted my dinner invitation when I saw him this afternoon (standard Honduran good manners, even if you have no intention of showing up), but also came, and exactly on time. Uncharacteristic of him, due to problems that have been familiar to me since my initial taste of gossip during my first week in Olanchito. In the back of my mind, I sometimes wonder who are these few Hondurans who choose to befriend we foreigners. Are they just nice people, like Sandra and her family? Are they people who know of worlds other than Olanchito, and who also feel socially isolated in this town? Fernando studies in Cuba; Jorge is half-Cuban and speaks English because of some connection his parents have with the States; our other Honduran friend Raquel (who spent time with us last fall before she got married and took on three teaching jobs) has also traveled out of the country (to Cuba). But are these people so willing to spend time with us because they are unoccupied by normal social engagements for some reason? Because Jorge has well-known substance abuse problems and is routinely estranged from his wife? Because unsavory rumors about previous men surround Raquel, who has the masculine habit of smoking, perhaps preventing her from making normal friends of her peers in Olanchito? Does being a foreigner relegate me to joining the ranks of the social pariahs?

But perhaps these friendships are based on something simpler: just being nice to each other. During most periods of my life in the States, I have had foreign friends. Some immigrated early in their childhood, but most only had temporary student visas or were so-called FOB’s (Fresh Off the Boat, what immigrants demeaningly call other immigrants who have arrived more recently). One reason I liked to be with foreigners was because their presence fed my curiosity for parts of the world I had never seen. But probably the main reason that I hung around foreigners, particularly newly arrived ones, was because most were still unaware of the structure or rigidity of the social hierarchy of their new environment, a hierarchy that I have always considered superficial and prefer to sidestep. Befriending a foreigner means spending time with someone who only requires that you be nice. A foreigner can’t tell if your clothes are stylish or not, they don’t care if you drive a cool car, or even own a car, because their family that is starting over from scratch in a new country certainly can’t afford much, and the lack of witticism or complex humor is greatly appreciated since they don’t understand English very well. You don’t have to be cool, or rich, or the sharpest tool in the shed to easily make friends with a foreigner. You only have to be open-minded. As long as you don’t constantly make fun of their bad accent, bad grammar or the bad haircut that they haven’t realized they should change yet, you have a loyal friend who is appreciative of every moment you spend with them.

And so I willingly put myself in their shoes here. I don’t care if other olanchitos think my Honduran friends are reputation-deficient, or if these friends simply spend time with me for the novelty of it. All I want is to be with nice people who have the patience to make the little extra effort to understand the foreigner.

Set up to fail

2006-07-11T23:23:00.000-05:00

Just days before I left on vacation to the States, I received disturbing news about the water project in Paletales and Almendras. A SANAA técnico previously uninvolved in the project and a new temporary SANAA engineer from Tegucigalpa had visited for the first time, re-surveyed the communities in half a day with their altimeter and industrial measuring tape, and promptly declared that the entire two months of work done up to this point is useless and has to be re-done.

They say that the dam is leaking on both sides and is so poorly constructed that it isn’t even backing up water behind it. They complain that the month-old storage tank in Paletales that the Canadians came all the way from another continent to help the community build is too small, and lacks valves in the right places. Furthermore, according to them, both of the tanks have been located in inappropriate places and storage tank for Almendras has to be relocated even though all the materials for the tank have already been carried there and the hole for the foundation has already been dug. Oh, and the 4 kilometers of foot-and-a-half-deep trenches between the water source and the communities that have taken almost two months to dig are too shallow, too circuitous, and go in the entirely wrong direction such that water from the source couldn’t possibly arrive at the community storage tanks. They lambasted the foreman for his supposed incompetence, even though until now, no one from SANAA has ever bothered to meet him even once since early May when he was first hired in a praiseworthy, rapid, after-the-last-minute effort by Alfalit to get a foreman immediately upon the Canadians’ arrival, when the two that SANAA supposedly hired stopped showing up because SANAA wasn’t paying them. Although it is the responsibility of SANAA to provide a supervisory engineer for their projects, no such engineer has ever visited the foreman to give him detailed instructions, designs, or any requirements of the structures that he is supposed to build. Furthermore, it was two engineers from SANAA who measured out the dimensions of the storage tank in Paletales, thus making it too-small. It was also a SANAA engineer (of course a different one from all the others previously mentioned) who chose the faulty storage tank sites. Not to mention that the foreman has repeatedly requested materials from SANAA since early May, including valves for the storage tank and rebar to reinforce the dam, without any response to date.

When all of this came out three weeks ago right before my vacation, I wasn’t yelled at specifically by anyone at SANAA or Alfalit but I felt the obvious. Doesn’t the gringa have a masters degree in hydrology? Wasn’t she sent by the Peace Corps to be a technical help rather than a disguised hindrance who needs her hand held? How could she have possibly messed up this badly and gjven recommendations to build a system in which the water wouldn’t even get to the communities? And even worse, I imagined the thoughts of the community members who had trusted me when I gave them direction to dig trenches in the “wrong” direction: Doesn’t the gringa have any respect for the time we left our fields where we grow the crops that feed our families, and instead worked on the water system? Doesn’t she appreciate the backbreaking labor of digging kilometers of trenches across steep, jungle-covered hillsides with only picks, shovels, and human sweat? How could she seriously ask us to do all this work over again because she messed up the design the first time around? At least all of that was definitely what I was thinking to myself.

But the fact of the matter is that I was set up to fail. I designed this water system from a topographic study done three years ago by someone unknown to me. Actually, there were two studies done by this same unknown person and a hodgepodge of handwritten notes. The two studies don’t jive in key locations in the water system, and the notes were left to me by the engineer who was previously my local boss until this past March, but who now refuses to speak to me because I started working with other engineers instead of letting him cloister me as his personal assistant. Numerous times I expressed my frustrations and doubts with the quality of the data that I had been given to both of the engineers I now work with, but they continuously brushed me off because they were too busy. I even tried to check the study myself with my own altimeter and GPS because they couldn’t or wouldn’t loan me theirs, but mine ended up breaking and so I couldn’t verify the study one way or the other. For months ahead of time I reminded the engineers that the project needed to start when the Canadian group arrived in May, and that materials and a contracted foreman needed to be in the community by that time. Of course, none of this happened and this project was virtually ignored no matter how many times I asked for supervision or support. In the end, I could only assume that no response from them meant that I was to use my best judgment. Unfortunately my best judgment was based on what SANAA now claims is a totally bogus topographic study, and my complete lack of construction experience.

Of course what stings most is that SANAA isn’t entering the picture until now, two months into all the hard work that has already been done. They have been utterly negligent in their supervisory responsibility, which in the end makes everyone look bad, not just them. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re well on their way to re-damaging their relationships with my organization (given that I will recommend that they not get another volunteer when I leave, just as the volunteer before me made the same recommendation), with Alfalit, and especially with the communities. SANAA has a particularly bad reputation in the rural areas around Olanchito because of previous promises that the institution has made and not kept. This type of mistake is one more reason why a community leader told me today that although he is willing to work hard for a water system, he has no faith in SANAA’s decisions because they keep changing engineers and “each one undoes the work of the previous one.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. But to be fair, the blame doesn’t lie with any particular engineer that has worked on the project. Of the few SANAA-Olanchito employees that actually work in my office, the engineers work the hardest. They do all the administrative work they aren’t getting paid to do while the politically appointed administrators, who have earned their jobs through nepotism and cronyism, watch World Cup games in the reception area all day. For reasons I don’t understand, they aren’t given funds for new hires that could reinforce them, so they are forced to manage and visit up to 45 projects at a time, projects which are so widely spread over the extensive and remote departments of Yoro, Colón and Gracias A Diós that they regularly travel and work day and night. And they resign themselves to accepting blame for a lot of what goes wrong with their projects, even when the blame isn’t theirs but is the fault of the institution that sets them up to fail.

Every day, every night on the streets of Olanchito

2006-07-07T21:19:00.000-05:00

Tonight my sitemate Lauren and I ate at Comidas Rapidas on the plaza, our first dinner together since I returned from the States. We left sated with enchiladas, but with our ears wincing at the strident singing of the bells announcing evening mass at the Catholic church across the street. As chaotic as it sounded, the calls punctuating our conversation were methodical and predictable after the first time: five seconds of loud frenetic clanging on the high bell, then five seconds of equally crazed bonging on the low bell, then on the high bell again, and so on for thirty seconds at a time. All through this, a third, lower bell tolled patiently, as if waiting for the others to quiet down in order to have its turn. Each episode always ended theatrically with several uninterpretable bangs on a final not-high-nor-low bell, spaced just far enough apart that each strike startled us back to the beginning of the conversation we had just tried to re-start. Finally we got far enough away from the church to converse normally as we walked to the Internet café closest to my apartment. At 7:30 pm it’s still light out since Honduras is on daylight savings time for the first time in history (well, half the country is, but that’s another story). So there were still plenty of people on the street. First we ran into my guitar teacher, who I haven’t played with since April but I keep telling him I’ll come back to visit him soon. I really mean it but I just haven’t had the time since I’ve been out of town so much, nor the motivation. I guess I’m finally adopting the Honduran way of saying no. After I told him once again that I’d come to see him next week, Lauren and I continued walking and talking, getting stared at by this pair of women with babies gossiping on the sidewalk and that gang of boys dangling their legs off their bicycles in a circle on the street corner. I recognized a woman in a red print blouse that walked past us with her friend, or sister, or cousin, but she outright ignored me and I couldn’t remember exactly how or if I knew her so I didn’t say anything. A block later, Lauren recognized a curly-haired teenager in a yellow shirt talking with two girls, but she couldn’t remember his name either and so we remained in conversation so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with him. A man leaning against the wall outside the pharmacy softly hissed at us as we passed, and we both sarcastically agreed that he was not only cool but also extremely attractive. As we rounded the last corner before arriving at the Internet café, we greeted the six members of the family that habituallly drag their furniture out onto the sidewalk every evening, because their living room is much more hot and boring than being in the middle of the action of the street.

The best part of walking down the street with Lauren is that we usually maintain a running commentary in English of everything we see and think. Someday we’ll probably get horribly embarrassed when we pass someone who actually understands rapid colloquial English, but the probability of doing so in this town is so low that we don’t hold anything back. Even if a Honduran could understand our words, he probably would be completely confused by our comments, since we both know that we interpret the various stares, glares, dubious greetings and come-ons very differently from the way Honduran women would receive them.

Once we arrived at the Internet café, I tried to make a phone call and Lauren checked her email. My call didn’t go through so I left her there to finish her business. The slow sunset sky had such a languid glow that I decided to take a more relaxed stroll before heading back to the house, this time alone. I had forgotten that evening strolls alone are never relaxing. Almost exclusively men walk and bike the streets at night, and a single gringa catches the attention of every one of them. I constantly get warned and reprimanded by my Honduran friends for being out at night unaccompanied, although nothing has ever happened to me. It is true that this town is more dangerous than the average American town at night, especially after 10 pm and on weekends when mostly drunks roam the streets. But I think Olanchito could really benefit from a Take Back the Night event, just so that women themselves could see that a lot of the danger is imagined. Perhaps night crime is even facilitated by the fact that half the population refuses to leave the house after dark and the streets, empty of law-abiding citizens, become an easier place for the bad to happen. Or perhaps I don’t see the point of worrying too much about being out after dark in a town where crimes that Americans only associate with the night have occurred here in broad daylight.

The best time to be out on the streets is Saturday morning. I still don’t know what’s different about Saturday, but everyone gets dressed up, especially the teenagers and the recently married who often still are teenagers. They strut around, the girls with their best girl friends and guys with their guy friends, eyeing each other but pretending not to as they pass on the street. Or they sit on the wide hot concrete benches in the park with ice cream cones, watching the newly established pairs who walk hand-in-hand. The young married couples unhurriedly drag their stumbling toddlers, probably the reason they got married so young. The men who are older and probably married but are still allowed to act like teenagers sometimes sit in the park too, but more often they sit in shaded doorways along the street so they can vocally and shamelessly admire all the single women that pass by. Saturdays are usually when I hear the most creative comments, called piropos, that are an art form used fundamentally to get a woman’s attention either by entertaining her or making her feel good about the way she looks. Unfortunately most piropos still make me uncomfortable because public comment on my body, positive as it may be, is still an invasion of my well-developed North American privacy.

Never before have I paid so much attention to such miniscule social habits anywhere else I have been. Usually I am drawn more to the landscape and affected more by the weather. Those still influence me, but what continues to test and provoke me most here are the people.

Back in Honduras

2006-07-06T00:02:00.000-05:00

And so I return, after a two-week vacation to the States, to the land of muddy brown boas of rivers, swollen from the monsoon rains. To the land that steams with a thickly visible humidity during these wet months, and with dust in the dry ones. I return to a Honduras that smells of the depths of mango season, and of rain pelting through the half-open bus window on my 5-hour trip from the airport back to Olanchito. And that smells sourly of dark, gritty feet unused to the confines of shoes, toes spread-eagled over the edges of plastic sandals.

The bus pulls into Olanchito after 8 pm; it’s already dark. Olanchito, with its bands of teenage boys on bicycles after sunset, and herds of gossiping teenage girls crouched on the curbs, and teenage lovers whispering in the shadows of the doorways of their parents’ houses. The town is so overrun by fifteen-year-old energy that sometimes it drives me crazy just to walk down the street alone at night and see all of them skulking, strutting, hunting.

My new neighbor, Azucena, notices my arrival and invites me into her apartment for beans, tortillas, fried egg and hard cheese. I have missed their salty, lard-rich tastes and I eat with relish. Half an hour later it all runs through me as I sit on the toilet. But that happened my first night back in the States, too, so I don’t worry about what is just part of the adjustment process.

I hadn’t been looking forward to coming back. Already I have been steadily stared at by children, young men and elderly people alike. I belong here too! I want to scream. My apartment is filled with two weeks of a sticky dust, and part of the living room floor is covered in a thin layer of mud where the rain apparently made it in under the door. When I pull back my sheets to get into bed, I see they have partially molded over, along with my pillow. But I expected all this. Every time I leave Olanchito, it gets easier to return.

Day of the devil

2006-06-06T22:08:00.000-05:00

Overwhelmed. One year later, that is still the word that describes how I feel here.

There are many things that I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around. The extreme generosity of strangers and friends who are little more than strangers. The lack of education, even in educated people. The heat.

But today I am mostly experiencing the now familiar feeling of overpowering uselessness. The water project construction I focused my entirety on last month is dead in its tracks: the Honduran government (SANAA) still hasn’t sent the tubes to start building the system, even though the communities have been digging the trenches for over a month. The foreman overseeing construction is getting restless living there without any work due to lack of materials. The local NGO Alfalit is buying materials bit by bit to keep the communities and the foreman from giving up, but its staff are getting frustrated with SANAA’s lack of participation in the contract the two organizations signed to cooperate on the project. Even the two communities are fighting amongst themselves over the little bit of sand, cement and rebar being provided to them for the shared system that will benefit them both.

It will be months before the system begins to be constructed in earnest, and months after that before it is done, and then what will come of it? A community leader whose land is immediately below one of the storage tanks already has his eye on using “his share” of the paltry quantity of water the system will provide to irrigate his vegetable field, which could potentially cut off those below him from receiving any water at all. It is likely that even after being educated on the disease-eradicating benefits of chlorinating their water, they still probably won’t do it because of local lore that chlorine causes sterility and the cop-out excuse that they are too poor to buy it. And after all the back-breaking labor and millions of lempiras put into the construction of the system and education of how to use it, it is still only a system of weak plastic tubes. It may very well be destroyed by a hurricane just like the several storms that swept across the north coast last fall, damaging dozens of similar systems that still haven’t been repaired.

Will having a water system really result in anything besides a lot of frustration, disappointment and interinstitutional and inter-community strife? I have to hope so, or I may as well quit now.

Time out

2006-06-05T16:30:00.000-05:00

For the past month I have barely been in Olanchito. After a brief jaunt to Tegucigalpa to take care of business at the main office, I returned to the municipality (kind of like the county) of Olanchito to live in a rural community in the mountains outside of town. There I stayed with a Christian Canadian work group a dozen strong, who came to help start construction on one of the water systems I have designed (for two adjacent communities named Las Almendras and Paletales). I served alternatively but more often simultaneously as head project engineer, construction foreman and translator. Leave it to Honduras to throw more at me than I ever thought I would be capable of. After those 2 weeks of daily manual labor under the tropical summer sun and sometimes mind-numbing amounts of translation, the Canadians invited me to vacation with them in Tela as a thank-you. I vacillated, but in the end did not allow myself to feel guilty about leaving Olanchito (and all my other projects there) for yet another week. By the time I had stopped by to say hi to Ely between Tela and La Ceiba and had followed the Canadians all the way out to Roatan on the Bay Islands, I realized how much I needed the vacation my boss in Tegucigalpa had recommended to me at the beginning of the month when I nearly broke down from frustration in his office. And THEN, another friend called and told me she was leaving the country (also frustration-induced) and could use my help moving, so off to San Pedro Sula and Santa Rosa it was…but before we packed her up for the capital, we (ironically) stopped by the Lago de Yojoa to celebrate with our training group our one year anniversary in country. I got back yesterday. I am so glad to have been gone for 5 weeks.

Not that I suddenly dislike Olanchito. But I was getting too emotionally involved in some of my work, and identifying too strongly with people who I am not. I needed a break not out of the need to escape bitterness, but rather to empty my mind of all the worries that I really am not getting paid enough to worry about. Or rather, that I have no use worrying about because I cannot control them no matter how much I gnash my teeth and rant, in Spanish or in English. Hondurans, and people in general, are much more receptive to humor and patience. Hopefully my work-play vacation of the past month, and my upcoming 3-week vacation in the States at the end of June and early July, will open me once more to both as well.

Language barrier

2006-04-22T14:39:00.000-06:00

I remember the time, as a child, when my understanding of language was still quite private and defined by my imaginative constructions of what many words meant, as I was still oblivious to many of their socially accepted meanings. I am reliving that experience at this phase in my growing but still nascent knowledge of Spanish. Let me give two examples:

1. Palomar: This word appears in old flamenco song lyrics and Neruda poetry. It also the southwestern US and southern California, infusing resort restaurants and gated housing developments with the required Latin touch in name if not in flavor. I deciphered palo (stick or tree) mar (sea) as driftwood, or perhaps the common name of a species of coastal tree. I learned yesterday that it really means dovecot or pigeon roost, being derived from the word paloma (dove).

2. Milpitas: I first heard the word seven years ago as the name of a town outside San Francisco. Using my limited Spanish vocabulary at the time, I translated it as mil pitas, or “one thousand pita breads,” thinking it was a figurative or whimsical expression of some sort and not inappropriate to the Bay Area. I now know that it is the diminutive form of the much more humble word milpa, and in fact means “small plots of corn.”

I hold that my own definitions are equally as intuitive as the officially accepted ones. Maybe my only mistake is too liberally applying the English grammatical concept of compound words formed by two nouns, which really don’t exist in Spanish.

What word did you have an inventive definition for as a child?

Not just a tourist

2006-04-16T14:36:00.000-06:00

Last night I returned, after 14 hours by bus, from a week-long vacation in El Salvador. Ely and I left last Saturday with a tour book and the phone numbers of a few friends we would meet along the way. Now being used to the way things are here, we didn’t waste any effort beyond that on planning. And I really don’t think that more planning would have made the trip any better. Not that it was bad. We enjoyed a great dinner at the home of volunteer friend Matt in Ocotepeque (on the extreme western border of Honduras, just before entering El Salvador) with Brittany and English teacher Ellie our first night of vacation. The next day crossing the border we met two fun young Israeli women, fresh out of the Israeli army and on a carefree year-long journey through North and Central America, and traveled with them through El Salvador for the rest of the week. Via multiple phone calls to the American embassy, Israeli embassy, and a San Salvadorean rabbi, we managed to arrange to be placed for an evening with a very sweet, extremely wealthy Jewish family in the capital to celebrate the beginning of Passover, exposing us humble volunteers for the first time to the filthy-rich business side of Central America. And on Good Friday, Ely and I saw exquisite and numerous examples of the famous colored sawdust “carpets” being designed on the streets by families of our hostel’s neighborhood in the capital, as well as took a day trip to the city of Sonsonate in western El Salvador where we saw a spectacular procession of hundreds of men in purple robes and head scarves and white lace shawls and gloves take turns struggling under a heavy wooden float of Jesus on the cross.

But I broke a record two months without getting parasites by achieving a new personal best of getting sick twice within a single week with two different stomach infections. We almost got mugged coming out of an ATM a block from our hostel in San Salvador (we escaped). There was no room in the hotels on the coast because everyone in the country was also traveling to the beach, so we didn’t go. There was no hiking allowed on the most famous volcano in the country because it is erupting. I was treated exceptionally rudely by the males of the small tourist colonial town of Suchitoto, where we stayed for two days before we visited the capital. I couldn’t tell that San Salvador, supposedly the nicest capital city in Central America, was really any more attractive than Tegucigalpa except that the mall was bigger.

I sometimes think that I should travel more while I’m here in Honduras, while I’m a volunteer and have the time and the connections all over Central America. But the truth is that I don’t like being a tourist here. The long dusty bus rides make me nauseous and dehydrated. While most people are very helpful to strangers, as a white woman I am a still inevitably a target for negative attention. The big cities are dirty and dangerous and without the redeeming qualities of nice parks or architecture or museums of the cities in less corrupt countries where governments actually cultivate their historical treasures. We really tried to enjoy San Salvador: we went to the central plaza, which had a well-kempt church but was in a terribly deteriorated neighborhood. We tried to go to an art museum, but the taxi driver didn’t know where it was. He took us to the Army museum instead, saying that all museums in the city display the same things. (or maybe weapons are art for salvadoreños? In any case, the museum was the most orderly thing I have seen since I left the States. Our American tax dollars at work.) And even the national parks are difficult to access and lack basic maintenance.

What I really like about Central America is living here. I like being part of a community in Olanchito where people talk to me, smile at me, and even take me in without requiring anything of me. They say that the true measure of a person is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. And maybe that is the true measure of a culture as well. I wouldn’t say that I’m doing no good here, because it fact it is my job. But the people who do the little things for me everyday here, the people who make me want to stay here, are not the people I am working for. They are the market lady who I only see twice a month but who always gives me free vegetables and hugs me and says she loves me. They are the old poor men with machetes at the bus stop who give me detailed directions to wherever I need to go and warn me against the bad people who might try to “rob” me. They are Sandra and her family, who continue to feed me and invite me to do everything with them and never ask me for anything in return. And really, though I try my hardest to pay them back in my own way, I really can’t give back to them what they give to me. It is not the buildings, or parks, or technology, or cuisine or art or music, that is the beauty of Latin America. It is the people.

You can’t take it with you

2006-03-29T23:48:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I forget that I left behind an entire life to come to Honduras. I gave away an entire apartment’s worth of furniture. I left most of the clothes I own in a closet in Maryland, and most of the other things I own in boxes in storage.

I also left my family. I left my career. I left a boyfriend I might have married.

Here in Honduras, I find that I am pressuring myself to recreate all of those things that had taken me a lifetime to find and to build. Even if I really need time to myself, I feel bad when I don’t spend enough time with Sandra, like I’m not fulfilling a family obligation. I feel completely useless on days that I get ignored at work. I wonder what is wrong with me that I am utterly uninterested in men that make advances toward me here and that I make men that do attract me feel inadequate.

And then I get a phone call from home tonight that reminds me that the first 27 of the 28 years of my life have not been here in Honduras. I can’t possibly expect to have the same quality of relationships here that I had in the States. I don’t need to be an expert at work when I changed the entire focus of my career to adapt to the professional opportunities I have here. I don’t need to worry about finding a romantic partner in this country when I know it will be so much easier once I am back in my own culture where I understand and agree with the rules.

This isn’t all so serious. I don’t need to despair if I don’t overhaul the attitudes of a nation in my two years here. And I don’t need to worry about re-creating an entire life’s worth of relationships and professional recognition in Honduras. I will be back in the States soon enough.

Being a professional

2006-03-29T16:45:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I feel like things are going really well. Monday, for example, I went back up to Piedras de Afilar and Planes to check the elevations of a few locations along the projected water system line and to talk to the foreman about the progress of construction. The first task was simple, involving my PC-issue GPS/altimeter and an easy 2-mile hike up to the dam site. Reading a handheld instrument panel happens to be a specialty of mine, being a skill I acquired in college and one that I have used in every job I have had since. But talking to a foreman and supervising construction? Just because everyone here calls me by the title Engineer doesn’t mean that I now am one. And nine months in the SANAA office has yet to give me experience in building anything.

But the tiny bit of experience I have gotten from watching the other engineers manage water projects was going to have to do. After checking the elevation of the water source (a spring) with the altimeter, I found the foreman perched on a steep slope a few hundred feet downstream, observing a test flow of water through the newly installed PVC pipes with a community member. We began to discuss his progress. He proceeded to ask me detailed questions about the projected layout of the entire water system, which I was able to answer because I actually do understand the design. Discussing construction materials is another story, but with the help of Marvin, a technical person from the office who had accompanied me on the visit, I managed to talk pipes and reductores and other accessories that I only know the names of in Spanish with the foreman for over an hour. Finally I jotted down a list of the materials that he said he was missing and headed back to the truck with Marvin. As we bounced along the rocky dirt track back down the mountain, I found myself filled with pleasant surprise that for the first time I had been to a community without the company of another engineer, and that during the entire visit I had been treated as the person in charge. I had also just convinced an experienced foreman that I knew what I was doing, so maybe I do really know what I’m doing after all!

Fast forward to today in the Biblioteca Digital. The instructors had their end-of-the-month meeting on Monday night, without inviting me and without taking into account any of the suggestions I had described to each of them in person and written down for us to discuss. As I talk to them one by one over the course of the afternoon, they all express frustration with other members of the group: so-and-so hasn’t been showing up, so-and-so is claiming to have worked overtime even though we don’t have money to pay overtime, so-and-so hasn’t finished their part of the plan for the course we’re going to start teaching on Monday. As far as I can see, all of these problems have arisen from the fact that the instructors haven’t bothered to take into account the suggestions that I so carefully elaborated for them. As much as I try very hard not to be their boss in the sense of defining how they spend every minute of their working hours, I do try very hard to provide the overall guidance that they seem to look to me for, mainly in the form of encouraging teamwork and communication. But while asking for my advice, they also resist it, even though since I’ve been working with them they’ve seen the most money enter the BD and have been the best paid since the project began. So much for convincing anyone that I know what I’m doing.

Highs, lows

2006-03-26T18:51:00.000-06:00

Life is so fast, so slow, so intense, stressful and boring that it is hard to keep up with it. I had so much to write in February, and March has not really been much different except for my level of willingness to reflect upon it. Finally having this willingness today, here is the monthly list:

• As a guest of honor at one of the many local high school pop ballad karaoke contests leading up to the national finals in Tela next month, I sang música de recuerdo (Bésame Mucho, Contigo en la Distancia, and Sabor A Mi) accompanied by my 70-year-old guitar instructor. My act followed that of other group of special invitees who rapped the reggaeton hit “Culo” (the rather lewd Spanish slang for butt, in this case a woman’s very large one). After the competition (in which I was not judged since I was a guest), the high school director smiled and said, “Thank you for your participation. It was really kind of a joke that you sang old music, wasn’t it?”

• A week later, I attended the annual city-wide (again high school level) karaoke contest so popular that thousands of olanchitos attended despite the utterly mediocre entertainment value of the event. It reminded me of Halloween in the Castro in San Francisco: there’s nothing going on but it’s sure fun to stare at 5,000 other well-dressed and attractive people. I borrowed a miniskirt from Sandra and pretended to be 18 again. It worked in a Latin American way: I received the most appreciative and exaggerated comments from strange men that I have ever gotten in my whole life. The comments unfortunately culminated in someone caressing my neck as I was forced to squeeze through a crowd of clamoring young men on my way to the bathroom. I didn’t see who it was, and I didn’t bother to figure it out. I just gave the whole group the finger without looking back. They liked that even more than the miniskirt.

• I was once again led on and once again rejected by my favorite/least favorite 20-year-old. I am still confused. I still have a crush on him. I think one of my unacknowledged hobbies is obsessing over men who are bad for me. Er, boys who are bad for me.

• After a long week in and out of the mayor’s office to stall the second electricity shut-off in one month at the Biblioteca Digital, I succeeded in meeting with, arguing with and finally convincing the entire city commission to continue subsidizing the BD power bill. It was a save-the-day moment which left me feeling both victorious and disappointed that the BD instructors do not have enough self-confidence to fight for their own jobs themselves. My final meeting with the commission made me late to a meeting with the instructors, and when I arrived at the BD for the meeting they yelled at me for not coming on time. I broke down and cried. They were not sympathetic.

• My boss at the national water agency SANAA, where I have all but given up working, has been given the new responsibility of evaluating the municipal water system of La Ceiba. Although he claims to still be the regional director in Olanchito, it’s no secret that this new job in La Ceiba is for the sole purpose of forcing him out of the Olanchito office. It turns out he’s as unpopular with the management in Tegucigalpa as he is with me. The Honduran engineer who is the right-hand-man of the head of all USAID projects in the country visited Olanchito this past week, when I had the opportunity to ask him what USAID’s official word is on who is the boss now. He told me that my favorite engineer Oscar, the young one who arrived in September to salvage the mess here, is now officially in charge of the USAID funding for my projects. I finally have an open door to start working with someone who is motivated, effective, and most importantly, willing to give me resources to make my efforts truly worthwhile at SANAA. Already I was given transportation to visit Piedras de Afilar and Planes last Thursday, where construction is now underway to build the water system I finished designing in September. It is just sad that my last conversation with my now-former boss was him lecturing me on how he is the only non-politically motivated person in the office and how the only thing that matters to him is that the communities get their water systems…followed by an adamant assertion that he is still the regional head and will always be the regional head and a series of blatant lies about the status of my project in Piedras and Planes. He may not be politically motivated, but he is certainly ego-motivated.

• I was invited to spend last Sunday afternoon with Sandra’s family and some church friends in Juncal, an aldea (small town) outside of Olanchito. We rode out in her family’s pickup, her parents in the cab and we seven kids (Sandra, her two younger brothers who still live at home, a cousin, a family friend, Stephanie and me) in the back. I tried to make a joke about Latinos never wasting space in any moving vehicle but of course no one got it. None of them have ever been to the States, where we race down our roads one to a car. When we got to Juncal (the last half kilometer driven on a flat tire), we ate, played cards, danced, took turns riding the poor abused horse someone had ridden to the party, played yard tennis, hit a piñata, and swam in the creek a half mile away. The river was only 3 feet deep, but crowded with people along a 200-foot stretch upstream of where the road crosses it. Well, the road doesn’t actually cross the river, but traffic does, including a bus that parked halfway through to let off bathers with towels as well as half-naked boys with raggedy brooms who proceeded to wash the bus in midstream. As a gringa, especially a gringa with her extremely white legs entirely exposed, the amount of attention I got was overwhelming. I faced it head on. I approached a group of 10-year-olds curiously calling out to the gringa, first chasing them around part of the creek and then stopping and asking every one of the ten of them their names, to which I relegated absolutely zero memory as the asking and not the remembering was the overture of friendship. I started playing games with them in the water, and pretty soon just about all of the three dozen kids in the river were playing with us (the younger ones) or watching us (the adolescent boys). I managed to organize a game of Sharks and Minnows, which they loved although kids randomly joined and dropped out of the game between rounds. They weren’t bothered by the chaos, though, so I wasn’t either. Finally I tired, sat back in the creek up to my neck with Sandra and Stephanie and watched as the boys finally organized their own water game, struggling to stack themselves three-high on each others’ shoulders for about 45 minutes. One little boy sat a person’s width away from me the entire time, just looking at me and lightly splashing water at me occasionally, I guess just to get me to complain at him and remind him that I really was human.

My housemates are back

2006-02-10T22:48:00.000-06:00

Ants will drink your vermouth, if you give them the chance. As of last week I have given them that opportunity, since I bought a bottle of sweet white to make negronies (thank you, Aurora). At least now I know I’m the company of beings that appreciate the taste of something other than wood.

Redefining roles

2006-02-10T14:24:00.000-06:00

Today I visited two rural communities in the mountains above Olanchito, called Las Piedras de Afilar and Los Planes. The former is full of a hard metamorphic slate that the people use for sharpening their knives and the latter is relatively flat (for being in a mountainous area), so I can give credit to no one for creativity in naming. I do give credit to the people of both communities for being dedicated and hard-working, though. I went up with Luis, the head of a small Honduran NGO called Alfalit that I recently started working with. Luis’ purpose was to inspect the fields of farmers who had used improved seeds and fertilizers provided by Alfalit late last year. My purpose was to provoke discussion of the status of the construction of the potable water system that I finished designing for them last September, with direction from my counterpart at SANAA (the federal Honduran agency in charge of water system construction and maintenance and the organization with which I was primarily placed). Although I was told by my SANAA counterpart that I was going to be able to work in the construction and not just the design of the system, I have been given no resources to do so, nor have I been included in the administrative process that precedes construction. Instead, a personal friend of my counterpart has been temporarily transferred from the La Ceiba office to oversee the construction and the training of the communities. Which would be fine because he is a SANAA employee and he is Honduran, except that he has no particular expertise and talks a lot fancier than he walks. And I am basically being confined to the office, which doesn’t help me understand any better the functioning of the systems I am learning to design. This, among many reasons, is why I have only been to the SANAA office four times since December.

In any case, I have found a new and more productive role in becoming a liaison between SANAA and Alfalit. These two organizations have theoretically been working together for awhile, in the sense that SANAA personnel have agreed to design water systems for certain communities and provide them with other technical support as well, and Alfalit has agreed to strengthen local water associations and look for additional funding sources for project materials that SANAA cannot provide. But the reality is that no one at SANAA has been responsible about sticking to their end of the agreement. As a result, water systems for some communities have been in the works for years without any progress. Since I started shuttling back and forth between the two offices 3 weeks ago, communication between the organizations, which had all but shut down, has warily re-opened. The main reason is that the heads of both SANAA and Alfalit have some degree of trust in me, even though they don’t have much trust in each other. Surprisingly, progress is already being made on the water systems of four remote rural communities, including Piedras de Afilar and Planes which I visited today.

I admit that my role feels a little strange, but at the same time it is precisely my position as an outsider and volunteer that allows me to sidestep some of the nonsense that has held up these projects. Assuming things continue to go well, I have my sights set on passing this responsibility to a particular capable SANAA employee who cannot currently be involved for various political reasons but who would make a great liaison once some of said politica blows past.

On a more simple level: today I saw fresh beans for the first time in my life. Until this morning, I hadn’t realized that the freshest beans I had ever seen were the already dried ones that you find in huge round woven baskets in Honduran farmer’s markets and in the bulk foods aisle of American supermarkets. Hondurans eat red beans, which in their dried state are the dark, dull color of iron-stained earth. Fresh, however, they are a shining alive red. Like blood.

Sandra´s family

2006-02-04T19:37:00.000-06:00

Nothing much happened today. But it was a different kind of nothing much. At least different from the last time I wrote about my typical Saturday.

I got up late this morning, after playing guitar and talking until 1 am last night at Stephanie’s apartment with her and Sandra and an acquaintance named Jorge. After eating a quick breakfast this morning, I went over to Sandra’s and helped her and her mother prepare small plates of boquitas (little snacks) for the inauguration of a new university program in Olanchito that Sandra’s father is associated with. Stephanie joined us a little later, and when we finished wrapping the one hundred plates Sandra’s mother was being paid for, we piled them in a big box and ate everything that was left. Stephanie and Sandra and I sat around her family’s dining room table and talked about our high school days and practical jokes and abortion and assisted suicide. Awhile later, her mother brought out fried chicken and potato salad and rice and mild white cheese for lunch, and we talked some more. We ate slowly, and I washed the dishes afterwards. Stephanie left to visit another friend, but I stayed. Sandra’s brother and cousin and another friend came in from the street, sat in a corner and began to play her brother’s guitar. Sandra ran back and forth between them and the family pulperia (dry goods store) in the front room of the house, singing along with the boys in between attending to customers. Sandra’s mother lounged on the living room sofa with me and told me about her husband’s hope to regain government employment now that the political party he supports has returned to power. After another hour or so of conversation, I finally left. I didn’t have any other pressing engagements, but I wanted to call my parents and run errands before the town shuts down at 6 pm.

I arrived at Sandra’s at 10 this morning, and didn’t leave until 3 pm. When I left, Sandra even invited me to come back tonight. Saturdays are different since I met Sandra. They are longer, and warmer. They aren’t so lonely anymore.

There are educated people here

2006-02-03T17:36:00.000-06:00

I made a new friend today in the Internet café. After he checked his email, he ran home to bring me a copy of his latest anthology of poetry, Todos los Días. It is Neruda-esque.

Suzanne and the Buena Vista Social Club

2006-01-29T14:21:00.000-06:00

One thing I forgot to put on my best-moments list that I posted last week is that I found a guitar teacher. I saw him one day when I came out of the Biblioteca Digital. He was playing in the park, his small bony frame hunched over the red body of his guitar, his dark wrinkled hands flicking dissonant chords out of the strings. I could tell he was playing musica de recuerdo (old folk music), and that he was good. A younger, whiter, rounder friend sat next to him. I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, and the sun wasn’t hot although it was already late afternoon, so I decided to sit down on a bench nearby and listen. As he played, he began to sing in a nasal voice barely audible from where I was sitting. His younger friend started laughing and was rewarded with a crotchety frown from the guitarist. In Honduran fashion, I watched the two men with the utter lack of subtlety that comes from intense curiosity. They soon noticed and returned my gaze between songs. Finally I got the nerve to walk over and sit on the bench directly opposite them. We started talking, and then we started trying to find songs that we have in common. Musica de recuerdo? Ranchera? he asked me. Swing? Blues? Music in English? I asked him. Finally I asked, bossa nova? He smiled. La Chica de Ipanema? I requested. He started playing. I started singing. People stopped walking past us and instead stopped to listen.

Since then I have started taking lessons from Don Israel on the back patio of the Catholic church’s public health clinic, across from the park. He is retired, but he hangs out at the clinic because the friend I saw him with that day in the park is a doctor at the clinic. I arrive around 4 pm on whatever days I can, and Israel comes anytime within the next hour, and he teaches me musica de recuerdo. Right now I am learning Sabor a Mi, Bésame Mucho, Quiéreme Mucho, and Amor Amor Amor (which was also famous in the U.S. in the 1950’s in its English-translated version). These are the old love songs that are kind of jazz, kind of salsa, the old songs that old men sing.

When there are no patients, the doctor sits down on the patio with us and listens. So does a young guy more or less my age who plays guitar and sings for the Sunday church services. Sometimes another older man named Camilo comes by. Camilo sings, the doctor told me the first time he introduced us. We are going to invite you to sing with us one night, he said.

And so I was invited to hang out last night with the doctor, my guitar teacher and a few of their friends. They refused to tell me ahead of time what the plan was, but told me they would pick me up at my apartment sometime after 7 pm. I assumed they would come by a bit before 9 and sure enough, they showed up at 8:30. I joined the doctor, his very large father and an unidentified woman of the doctor’s age named Alexa in the cab of their pickup, while three older men including Israel and Camilo greeted me from the back. We drove to a liquor store to pick up supplies and then headed uphill to the feria in Agalteca, where I had ridden the beautiful horse Fuego two weeks previous. (Festivals go on for weeks here in Honduras, this being the third weekend of the festival of San Sebastian.) When we got to Agalteca, the doctor pulled the truck up onto the shoulder of the dirt road, directly across from the soccer field in the center of town where all the action was, and in the exact same spot where I met Fuego two weeks earlier. The old men went off in search of a few chairs for the doctor’s father, me and Alexa, who by that time I had realized was the (married) doctor’s mistress. They returned with two slatted wooden patio chairs for us women and an entire bench for the father, who managed to fill it rather uncomfortably. I was handed a Miller Lite, which I graciously accepted, appreciating it as one of the higher-class beers one can be served in Honduras even though I hate it. They brought me a sliced lime and a pile of salt on a small plastic plate that they requested from one of the many makeshift restaurants set up under temporary aluminum roofs on the bare patches of ground on the edges of the soccer field, and showed me how to dip my finger in the salt and rub it with the lime juice around the rim of my beer bottle. In the States we only do this with Mexican beer, I told them. They looked confused.

I sat there in the dark on the edge of the road with Alexa, the doctor and his father. The old men stood a short distance away from us by the truck, talking about old-men things. Troups of teenage boys and girls sauntered the street in front of us. Crowds of single men milled amongst the restaurants and beer tents set up under the field lights on the soccer field. Two plates piled with pieces of juicy meat showed up for Alexa and me. As I passed off my dish to one of the old men after eating only four delicious pieces, I regretted being a vegetarian for 3 years and still having a weak stomach for meat. Loud reggaeton thumped from a hundred feet away, echoing from inside a building that seemed to be a dance hall. Drunk men on horseback rode by, kicking at their mounts carelessly and causing the horses to trip and wheel confusedly as if it were the animals that were intoxicated and not their riders. The doctor and his father downed their second, third, and fourth plastic cups of Chivas whiskey with 7-Up and began to laugh loudly and to spontaneously burst into acappella ranchera songs. Every five minutes they asked me if I was ready for another drink, even though I had already finished my beer and was now working on my own cup of whiskey without soda. I can’t drink like you two, I insisted. I’m only a third your weight. The doctor roared and high-fived me.

Finally the doctor asked me to ask Israel to play. I did, and he said he didn’t want to, though he directed his grumpiness not at me but at the doctor. But within 5 minutes Israel pulled out his guitar and tuned it, Camilo pulled out a pair of maracas and the other man, José, surfaced with a conga-type drum. They opened the tailgate of the truck and I sat next to Israel. They asked me to sing first. So we played The Girl from Ipanema. I sang it in Portuguese and then in English and all three of them nodded approvingly afterwards. A small crowd of boys of various ages clustered around us, staring and seemingly not understanding what kind of circumstance would entice a young gringa to hang out with three old men. Then we played Ojos Verdes (Green Eyes), a song that was also once popular as a swing tune in the States that I suddenly remembered that I know in both its original Spanish as well as English. Though I had never played it before even with Israel, the four of us went through it without a hitch. Then the three men took over. Camilo wailed out Moliendo Café, almost acting, as his voice and body and maracas moved with the emotion of the song. The men sang another that I didn’t recognize, this time in three-part harmony. They sang another, and another, all musica de recuerdo. Even Israel, whose talent is with the guitar, sang Voy a Cambiar el Nombre solo. Various groups of teenage boys came and went, and between songs the reggaeton still thumped monotonously in the background, but the group of old men remained undistracted. The smell of cooking meat and the sound of laughter wafted through the air. Skinny street dogs nervously approached and retreated. A slight chill came into the January night air. I thought to myself, this is how the Buena Vista Social Club must have started. Not in a studio or a basement, but at a party in the midst of friends and community, playing for the enjoyment of sharing their own sound with each other and anyone else who cared to pay attention. The beauty of it all is that I don’t think Israel, Camilo or José have ever heard of the Buena Vista Social Club. This is just what happens in small-town Latin America. Old men play old love songs out of the back of a pickup truck at their small-town fair at midnight. And sometimes people stop to listen.

Day of the Woman

2006-01-25T22:17:00.000-06:00

Today was el Día de la Mujer. Woman’s Day. It was also the day of the inauguration of the new mayor of Olanchito, who does not happen to be a woman. Nor is the new vice-mayor. In fact, only one of the ten new municipal cabinet members under the mayor and vice-mayor is a woman. But women were not forgotten at the packed inauguration, held on the outdoor stage and patio in the Casa de la Cultura. Four notable olanchitas, one of them the outgoing vice-mayor, were pinned with huge corsages while romantic music played. The new mayor offered a “hug and kiss” to all the women of the municipality. A local poet read his ode to women, to their kindness and humility and closeness to nature, and to the duty of strong men to protect their virtue. When he finished reading, the romantic music came back on and all the Honduran women present gave thunderous applause. Including Doña Sandra (17-year-old Sandra’s mother), whom I was standing next to. Then a woman with a high ponytail and a tight black blouse came onstage to present a flamenco dance in honor of the day. She did turns and swirled her red skirt and twirled her fingers through the curlicue hand movements and smiled. She did not stomp her feet. She did not pound her thighs and chest to the rhythm of the music. Her head was not held high. Everyone applauded her grace. I grieved for her absent power.

The inauguration ended and I waded through the crowd to get out. Women kissed each other on the cheeks and congratulated each other. Maybe the men kissed the women and congratulated them, too, but I didn’t see it. I went home thinking about my recently aborted relationship with a Honduran, and his expectation of me to be available to him at any given moment but who was never similarly available to me. I thought of how Lauren’s boyfriend makes up stories about where he’s going when he leaves her house at night, just so that she can’t keep track of him. I thought of how many Honduran men I have met who have abandoned women and children in their past simply because they were ready to move on; they usually start a family later on with another woman. I thought of an unmarried Honduran friend here who has twin daughters with the husband of her neighbor. The girls live with her and he often eats dinner and watches television at her house. I thought about how many men flirt incessantly with me at the bar, men who I later find out have wives and children at home.

Before leaving the inauguration, Doña Sandra invited me to dinner tonight. I had assumed it was because she was feeling lonely, since Sandrita is traveling in western Honduras with Stephanie and her family visiting from France, and Sandrita’s younger brothers Samuel and Daniel are in La Ceiba with their aunt’s family. But once I showed up at her house, she told me we were first going to church. After arriving late and sitting through the last half of the service, Doña Sandra snagged half a dozen mostly middle-aged friends from the small crowd streaming out of the church and we all headed to a restaurant to eat together.

It wasn’t until we sat down at our table that I realized that we were a group made exclusively of women and that we were celebrating Women’s Day. The women were in high spirits, joking boisterously about our ages (from 6 to 55) and flirting animatedly with the waiter. They ordered Jamaica-flower iced tea and the surf-n-turf special for all of us. They all curiously questioned me in order to get to know me, teasing me into their good mood. Other families passed our table as they entered and left the restaurant, smiling at our laughter and congratulating us for celebrating together. We were the only all-female table in the entire place.

I spent most of the night talking to the 6-year-old, who was seated to my right. She told me about how she used to climb mango trees with a cousin her age who just died this week from a donkey-kick to the chest. I don’t know if 6-year-olds are capable of being nostalgic, but if they are, she was. Nor do I know if a day in honor of women is really an honor if it is dedicated to celebrating a stereotype that reinforces the narrowness rather than the expansiveness of the role that women play in society. But at least I could spend the evening with the group that is best able to appreciate the individuality and uniqueness of each of us: other women.

It just gets better

2006-01-23T19:59:00.000-06:00

If I could choose to live only the most perfect moments of the past two weeks, these are what they would be:

*Organizing and leading a series of meetings between the instructors of the public computer lab (my main project right now) and a group of local university students who are equipping the lab with Internet as part of a required community service project. The purpose of these meetings has been to strengthen the partnership between the university and the computer lab for the longer-term benefit of both parties. For the first time, I have had the chance to fully and directly use my professional abilities, in this case group motivation and management skills developed during the course of my hydrology career back in the States, in the context of my work here in Honduras. I am facilitating the connection of groups that, for lack of a person with these abilities, would otherwise take only passing interest in each other. More importantly, I am teaching these skills: I serve as a role model when I lead a meeting, I keep all of the instructors involved in every level of the meeting-development process, and I directly explain my strategy to them before each meeting and require their participation. I am finally starting to understand how to match opportunities to use and teach my skills with the true needs (and not just desires or theorized needs) of the people I work with.

*Receiving a phone call from my favorite engineer at the SANAA office, Oscar, telling me that he is in the process of taking over management of the water projects I have been working on. The main reason I have been doing little water project work since November is out of a desire to avoid the technically competent but controlling and manipulative senior engineer who has managed me in the past. I now have hope that I can continue doing my very interesting and necessary work on rural water systems in a less hostile work environment.

*Ending the most frustrating relationship of my life with the least angry and most appreciative breakup of my life. Post-breakup, things are more complicated again, but at least the moment was good. And I am eating again.

*At the annual patron-saint festival in the small town of Agalteca on the edge of Olanchito, admiring an athletic, intelligent bay stallion being directed through a series of delicate steps by his rider… and the rider dismounting and telling me to get on. No questions asked. He just let me go in the middle of the fairgrounds with his horse. His stallion. Named Fuego. Fuego behaved beautifully but felt barely containable beneath me. He reminded me of why the flames of my horse obsession burned far beyond my preteen years, although I had little time to ride once I left junior high. Fuego will be my new boyfriend, if only I can find him again. I was too shy, too grateful or perhaps too smitten to ask the owner’s name when I dismounted.

*At a carne asada dinner after the festival, being served mistela, a traditional homemade liquor made of boiled dulce (unrefined sugar), clove, cinnamon and who knows what else…that tastes strikingly like Jagermeister. This is a good thing since I love Jagermeister and it is impossible to find in this country. Even better, it was poured into my glass out of what appeared to be a reused antifreeze container.

*Meeting a new gringo in town at the street market while shopping for a skirt. He qualifies as gringo because he was born and raised in San Diego, but this gringo is half Honduran and half Cuban and has lived in at least three different countries in the past decade. He is my age. He owns four tattoo parlors in southern California. He is living in Olanchito to hang out with his mother’s family. Hanging out seems to include sitting around with his aunt and uncle and cousins on their half-block of street-side storefronts, cooking chicharrón con yuca and doing construction. He is a walking stand-up comedy routine, given that he really likes to talk and is animated in the exaggeratedly expressive latino way even when he speaks in English. He has only been here a month so far. I can’t wait to introduce him to my sitemate so we can all go party at the bar together.

The Third Goal

2006-01-21T00:00:00.000-06:00

When I first began my volunteer service here in Honduras last June, my job responsibilities were clearly laid out for me by my project trainers, based on my organization´s mission statement drafted in the JFK days. According to the U.S. federal government, my employer, I have three goals. First, to provide technical assistance; second, to be a model citizen to serve as a positive example of the U.S. here in Honduras; and third, to take my experiences back at the end of my two years and share them within my own community to broaden awareness of the rest of the world, especially in those who may never see Honduras or may never even leave the country.

I had always thought of the third goal as the easiest. It´s just story-telling, after all. But it is not an easy experience to live here, and I am starting to realize that it will never be easy to explain. How will I be able to teach the dance steps that 17-year-old Sandra has taught me? Or recreate the mischievous smiles that old men on the street give me when they jokingly ask me to marry them and take them to the States? How will I be able to repeat the rapid-fire inspiration in my sitemate Lauren’s voice when she tells me about the group of high school students she organized to teach prisoners in the town jail how to use condoms to prevent AIDS? Or mimic the intensity of the stares that I get wherever I go, so intense that they sometimes still scare me even though I now know they only mean curiosity? How will I be able to express the restlessness of my French friend Stephanie on nights when she chain smokes and wonders out loud in her thickly accented Spanish how she is going to make a life with her Honduran boyfriend who is still studying in Cuba? How will I be able to adequately describe the acute loneliness of living in a culture that is completely unreferenceable to that of my native country? And how will I be able to deal with the equally acute loneliness of returning to a place I call home, but where most people will never understand how I have lived for two years?

Never gonna be a country girl

2006-01-10T14:10:00.000-06:00

It has taken me months to get used to the aesthetic hardships of Olanchito: little variety in food or drink at restaurants or supermarkets, even less in the way of cultural activities or night entertainment, and only the occasional conversation that reaches beyond the mundane. But still, I have been getting comfortable with it by appreciating the good things: the warmth of the people who live there, the humid coolness of the fog creeping out of the city and into the mountains every morning, the predictable over-saltiness of the baleadas at my favorite diner Deli Junior's. But now after another three days in Tegucigalpa (here for vaccination updates), the big city is already feeling like home again. I have been eating eggplant-mozzarella sandwiches and real chocolate cake. Brazilian bossa nova and African pop music play in the restaurants. I bought a bottle of my favorite American whiskey and even found and bought a bottle of Campari (obsession fulfilled). I have bought a fake (plastic) black leather jacket for $11 and fake (plastic) diamond earrings for $1.50 and everyone is calling me guapa. The taxi drivers are young and cute and all go to university and might even be over the age of 20. Why do I have to leave tomorrow?

Blue Christmas

2005-12-23T02:01:00.000-06:00

This week has been hard. Hard because I still have a cold that keeps me coughing and phlemy the minute I stop taking the meds the doctor gave me on Monday. Hard because the tail of yet another hurricane is whipping across the north coast and it’s raining non-stop again. Hard because I don’t understand what’s going on at the SANAA office though I keep trying to advance the one water project I’m working on. Hard because Hernán and I are not getting along and so I don’t feel comfortable working at the Biblioteca Digital this week (dating coworkers is not always the best idea). But most of all, hard because this is the first year that I am not with my family during the holidays. I haven’t lived at my parents’ house for over 10 years, but I have always made it home for Christmas. My family isn’t big and we never throw a huge party or go on vacation somewhere exotic together. We don’t drink or go dancing together. Nor do we cook elegant food or give each other expensive gifts. But we are always together, eating the same pumpkin pie that my dad makes from the can and making snide remarks at the monstrous Christmas lights that our neighbors hang on their houses. We always go to the same 9 pm church service and sing the same Christmas carols. My brother and I always fight over who has to distribute the gifts from underneath the Christmas tree. My father always gives my mother one of those fruitcakes that has a disturbing resemblance to a brick in both shape and weight (and in taste, I would say). My mom always gives me used books she buys for a dollar at the second-hand bookstore, and gives my father economy packs of 75-watt lightbulbs and double-D batteries.

This year everything seems wrong knowing that I won’t have that. Other than “Feliz Navidad,” no one is playing Christmas songs and all I still hear is reggaeton blasting from every stereo in town. I see the Christmas trees in other family’s houses and they aren’t decorated like my family’s tree. Nobody else has electric candles in their front windows like the ones that greet me the first night I come home for the holidays every December. And of course, it’s not cold. Even though it’s raining, the low has been about 65 degrees.

But if I don’t have family here, I do have a few good friends. I went to Sandra’s house on Tuesday afternoon just to say hi, and ended up staying through dinner and then getting invited to go over to a family friend’s house afterwards. What I had been told was just a visit to eat some cake turned out to be a full-on quinceañera (15th birthday) party, complete with several dozen guests, bocadillos (appetizers) accompanying a 10 pm dinner of Mexican tacos, a piñata and dozen teenagers schizophrenically flipping through their paltry ripped-CD collection in a night-long attempt to find a song that everyone wanted to dance to. Just as we were about to leave a little before 1 am, Sandra’s older brother and party-invigorator Will (who studies in San Pedro Sula but is in town for the holidays) showed up and we all proceeded to dance for yet another hour. I didn’t get home until almost 2 am. And that was just the beginning of the week.

Wednesday night I went to Ceiba with my sitemate Lauren to hang out on her last night in Honduras in 2005 since she’s vacationing with her family for the holidays. We went to the mall to see the Harry Potter movie, ate at the Pizza Hut next to the hotel and stayed up until 1 am watching Conan O’Brien despite a brief city-wide power outage, during which we took a break to have a nightcap at the hotel bar. (Even wanna-be hippies miss American pop culture.) I saw her off to the airport early the next morning and headed back to Olanchito. That afternoon, Sandra’s family invited me over to make nacatamales, a traditional Christmas food in much of Latin America. I didn’t get there until early evening, but Sandra, her mother Doña Sandra, her grandmother Doña Lola and our French friend Stephanie had been at it since mid-afternoon, stirring two different types of cornmeal masa nonstop for hours so they wouldn’t burn, boiling pieces of pork on the bone and spicing ground beef and rice to stuff inside the cornmeal, and cleaning the banana leaves used to wrap the tamales so they can be boiled. I was put to work cleaning a second mountain of banana leaves. That one task was long and tedious enough that by the time it was my turn to start wrapping the tamales, I had no patience left and made more complaints than actual tamales. But at some point we stopped wrapping and started eating, and boy are tamales good. I laughed inside, remembering that a certain Colombian told me last Christmas that nacatamales are a latino’s favorite holiday food to eat and their least favorite to make.

This afternoon Stephanie invited me to go with her and her best Honduran friend Paula to see the most Christmas-y house in Olanchito. We waited until nightfall, and then Paula drove us along with her son, twin toddlers and nephew to see the house with the most impressive display of lights in town. The entire yard and house were indeed lit up with the typical flashing, singing, blinking lights and horrid inflatable snowmen and Mary and Jesus figures I have seen in the States. More interesting was a small town, rather like the kind that toy railroad fans arrange, set up on an elevated platform under an extended eave of the house. What I didn’t expect was the inside of the house. An entire wall of the living room was set up with small porcelain Christmas figurines. Another high-ceilinged room was filled with shelves of life-like moving Christmas dolls and stuffed animals. Every corner of the four rooms of the house that we saw (which were obviously only used for the decorations because there was absolutely no space remaining to do anything but look) was occupied by yet another poinsettia-embroidered pillow or holly-wreath rug. All the rooms combined had no less than three different Christmas trees, all decorated differently. The sheer number of trite ornaments and decorations somehow cancelled out their individual cheesiness factors and converted the entire assemblage into a veritable Christmas museum. Not surprising was learning that the owner of the house has two children living in the States. I have heard that dollars sent from the U.S. are the biggest single form of income for Hondurans, and I am beginning to believe it.

After being overwhelmed by the house of tchotchkes, we returned to Paula’s house to make an eggnog drink and headed to another party at around 9 pm, this time to see Paula’s niece Tonia. Once again I didn’t realize that we were going to a big family birthday party until we got to Tonia’s house, where a dozen women were belting out ranchera ballads to the tune of a computerized karaoke program and another two dozen young and old family members were running (younger) or milling (older) around the house, popping ballons (younger) or smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes (older). Tonia’s mother and ex-vice mayor Doña Ester immediately served us each an enormous plate of pork ribs and birthday cake with a sandy, too-sweet icing, neither of which I could stomach. Before long we were in front of the computer with the others, pretending to sing along to the ranchera music before Stephanie and I co-opted the karaoke program and started playing U2 and Bob Marley songs. It was only OK because Tonia knew all the songs we chose and could sing along with us in English, too. We ended the night at 1 am dancing along to the video of Guns ‘N Roses’ “Paradise City.”

Returning home tonight, I feel a lot better about being away from my family this Christmas. Before Honduras, I had never considered bad birthday cake and bad karaoke to be blessings. But somehow right here, tonight, they are.

Happy Birthday Suzanne

2005-12-19T19:45:00.000-06:00

I feel awful today with the flu and pink eye. I’ve only been awake for four hours so far today and I doubt I’ll make it to six. I missed three work commitments, and the fourth that I chose to leave my bed to attend was cancelled. The only thing I’ve had the energy to eat all day has been one Cup O’Noodles, and I poured boiling water on my hand (again) while making it.

At least my party this weekend was fun. Because today I really don’t want to be in Honduras.

Futbol

2005-12-18T19:31:00.000-06:00

I’ve lived in Olanchito for over half a year now, and every week (and sometimes every day) brings discovery, usually of something that is fascinatingly new to me but utterly commonplace to the people who have lived here their entire lives. Of the many things that I didn’t realize I didn’t know, I recently found out that Olanchito hosts a semi-professional soccer team. Given that Hondurans are so absolutely crazy about soccer that almost every single member of the population sides with a particular team, I feel rather clueless for not learning this earlier. This discovery came about now that my sitemate Lauren and I both find ourselves dating members of the same local team. Of course if we’re dating players, we have to go to a game, which we did this afternoon for the first time.

Since I had agreed to spend the early part of the afternoon helping some community women host a bingo tournament fundraiser for poor children, we arrived at the game near the end of the first half. We easily walked to the stadium since it’s less than a mile from the center of town, and bought tickets for the shaded section (we’re not trigueñas yet) at $3 a pop. We walked in to find the stands packed with perhaps 300 people, all of which appeared to be men. Hence many piropos and hisses followed us as we made our way through the crowd to sit in the front row of the covered concrete bleachers. With everyone watching us, we proceeded to watch the game. The home team, Sol (Sun, appropriate for a team based in sweltering north coast), was wearing green and yellow, and we quickly picked out Lauren’s muchacho, nicknamed El Travieso, playing number 8 offense. I didn’t see mine, but I didn’t expect to see him since he told me that he mostly sits the bench. Luckily Hondurans are much more fond of soccer than of gringas, and the testosterone-heavy crowd quickly forgot us, especially since Sol scored within minutes of our arrival. Roaring with all its small-town pride, the crowd jumped to its feet as the team’s theme song played over the loudspeakers. We screamed and clapped along as well as we could, Lauren with bronchitis and me with a bad cold. It was then that Lauren noticed that there was no scoreboard, and we had no idea who was winning. I turned to the little girl sitting next to me and asked the score, and she told me that we had just seen the first goal of the game. Good thing we came when we did, because it turned out to be the only one of the entire afternoon. Even so, watching the game was exciting, though as a former goalie herself, Lauren had a much better idea of what was going on than I did. Because of this, Lauren immediately recognized that my muchacho, Hernán, was the replacement goalie when he appeared in a red and black uniform, walking down the sidelines with a short string of other substitutes all in orange vests. I waved at him as he perused the crowd before entering the dugout, but he didn’t see me. I didn’t see much more of him, either, since he was never subbed in and sat out the second half with the other replacements.

I admit that even though I very much enjoy watching live soccer, checking out the stadium and the crowd at my first Honduran soccer game was just as riveting as the game itself. Though the stands were crude and there were no trash cans anywhere, the field itself was very well-kempt. Bicycles belonging to the fans, mostly without chains or locks to secure them, were cluttered in front of the stands. I noticed that there were more women and children in attendance than I had originally thought. I saw the stray dogs with mange and tattered ears, ubiquitous in Olanchito, sniffing among the discarded plastic soda bottles and food wrappers tossed into the grassy patch between the stands and the field. I gave a few of the crackers I was eating to a dirty shoeless child who sat down next to me and stared at me, obviously hungry, and then fended off three more just like him who suddenly appeared, demanding the rest of my crackers like petulant vultures. I winced every time a group of boys set off red strips of small but deafening firecrackers just in front of us, eagerly and fearfully jumping in and out of the popping sparks to grab at their small prizes. And once everyone had stopped looking at we gringas, I felt comfortable enough to do my own looking. I searched the crowd for familiar faces and found one in the back row, a student in one of the classes at the computer lab where I now work. We gave each other a friendly wave, and it felt good thinking that I now know enough people here that I can run into acquaintances without planning it.

After the game, Lauren waited with me in the small crowd milling around the locker room (a small unpainted cinderblock building on one side of the field) as I waited for Hernán to come out. While we waited, we chatted with another acquaintance, an expelled member of the team whom we had seen at the bar the previous two nights in a row (perhaps that’s why he was expelled). After a final team prayer in the locker room with the local priest, Hernán emerged and we left the stadium together with Lauren, who didn’t want to wait any longer for El Travieso. We walked up the dirt road toward the center of town, chatting a bit before Hernán realized that El Travieso was not in fact walking with us but was instead walking in small group of teammates only a few hundred feet behind us. He jokingly chastised Lauren for not waiting for her caballero and stopped in the middle of the road, forcing us to wait while El Travieso caught up. Once he did, we continued up the road as two pairs. Lauren and I half-smiled and half-grimaced in amusement and embarrassment as a pickup truck filled with most of the rest of the team raced past us, cheering at their teammates with the gringas.

El Travieso says he’s going mojado (literally “wet,” meaning going illegal to the States) at the end of January, and Hernán and I aren’t getting along very well right now for various reasons, so neither Lauren nor I may have many more moments like these. But when it’s all over, at least we will be able say that for a little while, we dated some of the most noticeable guys in town. Or maybe Hernán and El Travieso will say that about us.

Bring on the parties

2005-12-11T17:46:00.000-06:00

After a long November of hurricane after hurricane, non-stop depression-inducing rain and a few more bouts with Honduran illnesses, at last it is December. The month of celebration. Of Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and my birthday. Bring it on.

The first party of the month was yesterday, though it was somewhat unexpected. Since Thanksgiving, I have been planning a joint birthday party with Ely, one of my best volunteer friends who lives a 3-hour bus ride away from me. Our birthdays are within 10 days of each other and for three weeks we have been discussing amongst ourselves a full day of celebration, starting with a day hike and ending with a dinner party. Since Salsa Dave from the south is planning to visit me next weekend, we tentatively planned the party to be in Olanchito on the 17th.

It turns out that our north coast friend Michael was organizing faster than us. Last Saturday, he announced a surprise birthday lunch for Ely at a seafood restaurant near La Ceiba on the 10th. Not telling Ely about this arrangement, I continued to plan our joint party with him and finally sent out our email invitation to other volunteers late this week.

Late yesterday morning, my sitemate Lauren and I left O’chito on the bus for what should have been a less-than-two-hour ride to Sambo Creek, a Garífuna (a distinct Honduran ethnic group with a strong African heritage) town on the Atlantic coast where the restaurant is located. Of course the ride was longer, maybe because of the Christmas-time Telethón volunteers standing in the middle of the road every dozen miles and stopping passing traffic to collect money for charity. The bus ayudante was particularly obnoxious, too, spending an inordinate amount of time not collecting bus fare, as is his job, but rather standing behind Lauren’s seat trying to get a glimpse down her shirt. In any case, it was nice to have her company since I almost always take the bus alone. She lent me one earphone of her Ipod and we discussed music all the way up to Sambo Creek.

When we finally slipped past the salivating ayudante and off the bus, we walked about a mile down the main cobblestone and cement road through Sambo Creek to the restaurant, greeting the relaxed gazes of the dark-skinned Garífuna women in colored head wraps sitting on their front porches with “Buenos días” as we passed, and ignoring the teenage boys who too obviously wanted our attention. When I spent a night in the Cayos Cochinos at the beginning of October, I was given the unusual privilege of being taught some of the Garífuna language by the islands´ residents, including “Bwiti binafi,” which is equivalent to the Spanish greeting we were using in Sambo Creek. I was too shy to use it at that moment, though, because it was already afternoon and I wasn’t quite sure if it is only a morning greeting. The Garífuna are open, friendly people but are also well-known for guarding their culture and language proudly, and well, the only reaction I would have wanted from the porch-sitting women would have been “That gringa can speak Garífuna!” rather than “That gringa can’t even speak Garífuna!”

I noticed the breaking of ocean waves before I noticed that we had arrived at the restaurant, which was perched on pilings one storey above the sand that suddenly spread itself not 20 meters from our feet. Lauren and I walked up the stairs to find four other north coast volunteers already enjoying fresh lemonade together. After the requisite round of hugs, I immediately gravitated toward the view. I saw pelicans soaring and diving, soaring and diving over the sea. Like elephants, their movements were unexpectedly effortless and graceful for being so awkward-looking. I saw long battered canoes pulled up on the shore, and Garífuna men arriving and leaving in more of the same. At a distance over the smooth blue water, I saw the Cayos Cochinos that I visited back in October, Cayo Menor’s lower peak superimposed on the hulk of Cayo Mayor. I strained to see the tiny white-sand islets that I know only host clusters of man-planted coconut palms, but my eyes couldn’t reach them.

More volunteers and expat friends arrived until there were about fifteen of us. Michael finally showed up with Ely and we all sang “Happy Birthday” upon his entrance. (He was surprised.) It turned out that the party was for me, too, and everyone sang once again when Ely and I blew out our respective candles on our respective cakes, which were actually two small round pans of different-flavored brownies made from American (i.e. good) boxed mixes that had arrived in someone’s care package from home. We all ate lime-cilantro ceviche, king crab with claws as big as my hand, garlic shrimp, immense bowls of seafood soup.

Maybe it would be trite to say that my first birthday in Honduras was spent sipping a cocktail and slurping conch-coconut milk soup, surrounded by friends at a restaurant overlooking the Caribbean Sea. But that’s how it was. Beautiful.

My apartment is an hormiguero

2005-11-10T16:39:00.000-06:00

I should have mentioned the ants earlier. They are my housemates, all x million of them. They live under the floor and kick chewed grout out of their holes every night; they live in the kitchen counter and at every meal usually make it onto my plate before my food does. They scout my table frantically whether I am eating or just reading, and crawl up my chair legs and onto my arms whenever I sit down. When I was still sleeping on my foam mattress on the floor, they would crawl in my bed and wake me up at night.

They are tiny, and don´t bite. But they eat through the plastic wrap, paperboard and styrofoam of my packaged food that I leave on the shelves. I have learned to keep anything that has been opened and not finished in the refridgerator just to save it from the ants, but they sneak in there anyway when I´m not looking. They eat through the metallic film of a pack of pills to get access to the sugar coating on my anti-parasite medicine. Last night I discovered they are eating the shelves themselves, the only piece of wooden furniture I bought that I have not yet varnished. (Oh, and the shelves are now molding, too.)

This is why I say that my apartment is an hormiguero: an anthill. Or if the word exists, an hormiguerón.

Saturday in Olanchito

2005-11-05T16:53:00.000-06:00

Today I woke up at 6:45 am, without an alarm since it was sunny this morning. I got out of bed half an hour later. I read the latest (mid-October) edition of Newsweek sent by the main office while eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a glass of lemonade spiked with anti-dehydration salts (still sick). Encouraged by the sunshine, I threw all my dirty shirts into the larger of my plastic laundry tubs, and at the last minute remembered to test the water in the faucet to see if it was suitable for doing laundry. A greater or lesser degree of mud has been running through the plumbing due to all the rain. Today the water only had a few stick and leaf particles and no suspended clay, so I ran the water into the tub with some powdered laundry soap and left the shirts to soak. The next errand was to go to the market and buy some vegetables. I have only eaten Ramen and Cheerios since I got sick on Wednesday morning, and have barely wanted to eat even that, so waking up this morning resolved to get better meant going to the market would be critical. I dressed more appropriately and walked the two blocks to the main street through town where the market is located. I bought what I still consider to be a huge bag of green, red, purple, white, orange, yellow and brown edibles; I still don’t understand how I manage to eat all of them in a matter of half a week except that I’m pretty much off sandwiches (latino friends of the world celebrate!) and have been getting more creative at lunchtime.

I got a lot of piropos on the way to and from the market, though I was dressed rather shabbily compared to the typical Honduran on the street on a Saturday when everyone is parading their tightest and shiniest. I finally figured out that it was the way I was walking. I bought a new pair of sandals in La Ceiba last week and they hurt as I’m breaking them in, so I walk with Chinese-like mincing steps that tend to make my butt move a lot more than my usual walk. This must explain my latino friends’ attraction to Asian women. I wonder if foot-binding was ever popular in this country?

Finally 9 am arrived, the hour at which everything behind a storefront opens, so I biked to the pharmacy and bought sunscreen for an exorbitant price (my arms are no longer white, but the color of my face approximates the tan on a boiled crab) and then biked to the doctor. He’s getting to be a good friend of mine. He prescribed me three medications after listening to my stomach bubbling away with his stethoscope, I think mainly to rip off the Peace Corps who foots the bill rather than out of my real necessity for all of them. My favorite anti-parasite medicine was in the collection and I immediately started taking it.

Feeling optimistic about the weather as it was still sunny 3 hours after waking up, I biked back to my apartment to finish washing my shirts and do the rest of my laundry at the pila. I finished an hour later and then sat in my apartment to rest before making lunch of leftover rice, guacamole with crackers and lemonade with anti-dehydration salts. My landlord’s little red Bug pulled into the courtyard and I went over to her apartment to pay the rent. I explained to her that I now have a leak in my bedroom, and also could she please sent the machete-guy to cut back the lovely-but-becoming-monstrous flowering tree in my backyard that is prevent sunlight from coming into my bedroom and promoting the uninhibited growth of mold. She said of course, she would have both things taken care of today. I’ll ask her about them again next week.

As for the rest of the afternoon…it has started raining and I had to take all my wet laundry in. Hopefully it will be sunny tomorrow morning and I can put it all out again then. Meanwhile, I am watching plenty of Hondurans biking and walking down my street in the rain, but four years of living in the desert means I’m still afraid of getting wet and I would rather sit in my apartment and wait it out. Which makes for a good excuse to listen to my new bachata CD on repeat and to write a blog entry.

Some days

2005-11-02T16:42:00.000-06:00

It is the 5th day of rain. I have a vomiting disease again, without any clue of how I got it except that the brand-name bottled water I bought yesterday in La Ceiba wasn`t so brand-name. My job is frustrating me and I don´t want to go to work.

Redemption: seeing a critically endangered Honduran emerald hummingbird at the flowering tree in my backyard this afternoon.

Hurricane brings abrupt ending to jungle party

2005-10-30T14:41:00.000-06:00

Mystifying moment no. 254

2005-10-26T13:25:00.000-06:00

I was at the market this morning, when I noticed that my favorite banana-lady was offering a basket of orangeish-brown, smooth elongated fruits that I had never seen before. I picked one up, appreciating that it was thicker than my wrist and as long as my forearm. Only the firm, canteloupe-like density distinguished it from a disturbingly large hot dog. When I asked what it was, banana-lady answered, "Melocotón." A peach.

I bought it.

Fitting in

2005-10-08T15:02:00.000-06:00

Even though I’ll never be able to blend in with a crowd here because of my physical appearance, I am nevertheless slowly taking on some Honduran habits. Here are the most obvious to me:

• I never wear shorts in public, even though the daily average temperature is around 90 degrees.
• I ride my bicycle on whichever side of the road is most convenient to avoiding big ruts, lazy pedestrians or traffic in general.
• I eat deep fried plantains or bananas multiple times a week. And not at a diner. I buy them in the market and cook them for myself.
• While conversing, I point at things with my chin rather than with my index finger, the latter of which is considered rude.
• I now enjoy dancing to reggaeton music. I hated it before I was forced to listen to it in every grocery store and restaurant, on every passing car stereo and from most of my neighbors’ houses in turn at all hours of the day and night. The latest at night I have heard loud reggaeton being played: 3 am. The earliest in the morning: 7 am. I am still waiting to hear the strains of acappella-sung reggaeton wafting from a Friday night sing-along at the evangelical church.
• I do not plan get-togethers with friends more than 2 days in advance. Even 2 days ahead is considered the distant future here, though, so I’ll be even more Honduran when I stop planning completely.
• I have stopped thinking about what I am going to do after my two years here are over, or about the future in general.

Here some things I have yet to pick up on:

• Wearing skirts. A skirt is an acceptable alternative to jeans or long pants, and even a long-ish conservative one that I could probably get away with wearing would certainly provide more ventilation on a hot day (i.e. every day). But I just can’t do it. Now that I have a bike and ride it everywhere, wearing a skirt is even less appealing.
• Cooking everything in lard (even though lard made from vegetable oil is more popular than real lard here).
• Cooking beans and rice. I used to cook them often for myself in the States, but it’s too depressing here because I can finally tell how awful my beans and rice really are.
• Pointing at things with my lips like Hondurans do. I can do it, but it makes me feel like a clown.
• Staring long and hard at strangers. This is just rude.
• Not worrying about work. I’m starting to worry less, though.
• Waking up early. I still get up between 7 and 8 am most days, which is two hours after most Hondurans. I did get up at 6:15 am this morning without an alarm, though, so maybe this is starting to wear off on me as well.
• Watching TV before breakfast, before work, after work, during dinner, after dinner, and in bed before going to sleep. I still prefer books. Watching the tube obsessively is equally norteamericano as it is Honduran, though, so this counts as not fitting into American or Honduran culture.
• Whistling and yelling “Eye lub yuu, baybee” to people on the street. Wait, are women allowed to do that?

Now that I’ve finished drawing up these lists, it appears that there are more Honduran mannerisms and preferences that I don’t feel comfortable with than those that I do. So much for the title of this post. But I still have plenty of time to learn. It wouldn’t be very Honduran of me to worry about it, anyway.

Every. thing. is. wet.

2005-10-05T20:29:00.000-06:00

I woke up this morning and last night’s dinner dishes in the drainer were still beaded with water. The shirt I wore yesterday, which I hung on a hanger in my open-air (i.e. lacking doors) closet, is now damper than when I took it off last night. My backpack is molding for the third time. I just finished a 4-week, 2x a day antifungal cream regimen to fight athelete’s foot, and it took all four of those weeks to get rid of it. Immortal algae on the floor of my shower are approaching the length of kelp.

At least my skin is soft, apart from the areas that are burned from my weekend in the Cayos. (Those parts are now itching like mad.)

It has been the rainy season in Honduras since I arrived in May. And sure enough, it has rained often and hard everywhere I have been in the country during these past 4 months. But over the past few weeks, the daily afternoon 1-hour downpour has morphed into a daily 2- or 3-hour downpour, sometimes segueing into an all-nighter. All-nighters bring the rain directly into my apartment via the crack beneath my front door and flood one side of my living room. Luckily I haven’t been able to afford to completely furnish my living room yet.

People tell me that all this rainfall and the ridiculously thick humidity that accompanies it are normal this time of year. “Ya viene un aguasero,” directly translated as “A whole bunch of water is coming right now” and loosely translated as “Here comes a drencher,” has become a standard comment appropriate to late morning, afternoon and/or evening conversation. On the east coast of the U.S. where I grew up, the summer rainy season peaks in August and decrescendos thereafter. Which is why I wouldn’t have thought it possible that as October begins, it is now raining harder than ever.

A Kind of Paradise

2005-10-04T19:23:00.000-06:00

Teaser photos (entry about how I spent last weekend will be written soon)

Not Subtle

2005-09-25T20:32:00.000-06:00

All of my pants were being washed today by my former neighbor Suyapa, who is fortunate enough to have a washing machine and whom I pay every other week to do the majority of my laundry. Since my trip to Siguatepeque and Santa Rosa, I hadn’t done any wash myself and so had accumulated a larger pile of laundry than usual by the time I took it over to Suyapa’s. And since I had given everything to her to wash at once, I was stuck wearing my spandex yoga leggings all day. Knowing pants this tight on a gringa would probably cause a minor riot on the street, I hung around my apartment all day until I finally had to go pick up my laundry. I got on my bike and was relieved to see that the Sunday afternoon streets were almost empty. Nevertheless, I had to pass a few men on the way. EVERY one of them commented (usually I only get a 30-50% response rate). My pants even set one man at the car wash howling. I am not kidding. I have no idea what criteria men use to determine that a woman is good-looking when she’s sitting on a bike and the relevant parts of her figure are scrunched between the handlebars and the seat. But somehow they manage to see everything they’re looking for. And Hondurans are nothing if not dramatic.

Earthquake!

2005-09-23T20:11:00.000-06:00

Every profession has its requirements for induction. Like every good geologist, I have patiently awaited my chance to legitimize myself by fulfilling the triumvirate of earth process experiences: seeing a glacier, getting close enough to an erupting volcano to see fresh lava without becoming part of the rock cycle, and feeling an earthquake. Up to this point in my life, I have lived in the same country as glaciers but not seen them (New Zealand, and technically the U.S.), hiked in a chain of erupting volcanoes but been prohibited by the military from getting within miles of any lava (Mexico), and lived in San Francisco for two years without being in town anytime an earthquake occurred. It might very well be this subtle discouragement that drove me away from studying geology and led me toward hydrology instead.

But today I came one step closer to being geologically validated. At about 7:45 am, I was lying on my foam mattress on the floor, mentally preparing myself to get up, when I suddenly felt a low frequency quivering underneath me. I listened for a heavy truck that might have been passing on the street, but I heard no such noise as the shaking gave way to a forceful circular jolt that set my bedroom chandelier jangling. The whole incident lasted over 5 seconds, which was enough time for me to 1) realize that I was in fact experiencing an earthquake 2) question myself as to whether I should get under something sturdy, and 3) decide that I wasn’t afraid because I couldn’t hear anything falling or anyone screaming outside. The power didn’t go out; the birds didn’t even stop chirping. Afterwards, I laid there peacefully for a few more moments, basking in my geologic initiation.

I talked to my coworkers about it this afternoon, and they tell me earthquakes aren’t common in Honduras. It seemed as much a source of entertainment, and not fear, for them as it was for me. Though there’s not much to be afraid of during an earthquake in a town of 1-story adobe and cinderblock buildings. According to the USGS, what we felt was a magnitude 5.8 centered just off the coast of northern Honduras. I made an entry for Olanchito into the "Did you feel it?" USGS online shake map. (I´m the unlabeled light blue circle just inland/southeast of the large light blue circle on the Atlantic coast at the city of La Ceiba.)

My second success of the day: I bought a bed. I am not sleeping on the floor anymore as of tonight! As usual, this single large purchase has drained my bank account, with a week still to go until my next paycheck. For those curious to know what purchases have made me broke 3 weeks into every month since I moved to Olanchito, here they are:

Bed (Full)
Foam mattress (twin)
2 sets of unfinished wooden shelves
chest of wicker drawers for clothing
30 plastic hangers and 3 wooden ones
Plastic corner caddy for bathroom
Nightstand lamp
Oscillating free-standing fan (my first purchase)
5 chairs (4 plastic and 1 used wooden one)
small unfinished wooden table (18" x 30")
small fridge/freezer
2-burner tabletop electric stove
set of cooking pots and utensils, including 1 chopping knife
blender
Tupperware set
Tableware (6 glasses, 2 mugs, 2 plastic cups, 4 plastic plates, 6 plastic bowls and 2
porcelain ones, 2 forks and 2 spoons
various other kitchen ware (colander, plastic pitcher, ice cube tray, 2 cutting boards)
3 small plastic trash cans
a few tools and cleaning supplies
2 locally woven fruit baskets and a small glass vase for flowers
2 large plastic tubs, soap, and plastic clothespins for doing laundry
bicycle (but I was reimbursed for it)
cell phone

Aside from the things I brought with me from the States and 4 more culturally appropriate (i.e. tighter and collared) shirts I have bought, the list above is all that I own. I’m having a little trouble furnishing my 2-bedroom apartment on my salary. A fun fact I found out today: a Honduran at my agency of the experience and educational level I had before I got my masters and worked in consulting makes two and a half times more than I do. Now I definitely feel like a volunteer.

My first visit West

2005-09-19T17:35:00.000-06:00

(long entry alert. This one makes up for the 3 weeks I didn't write anything)

Last week’s work began Monday at 3:30 am, when I left my apartment in the dead of night to walk the one block to the bus station to catch the first bus to Tegucigalpa. Once again I was heading down the long road south, but this time I was stopping two hours short of the capital. A project workshop for all of the volunteers in the country in the water and sanitation (me) and health programs required us to meet for three days in Siguatepeque, the city where I lived when I first arrived in Honduras. We 70 or so volunteers converged on the Centro San Francisco, the familiar self-contained training center and dorms on the edge of town, from Monday at noon through Wednesday. For two and a half days we shared our work experiences formally by day, in structured round table discussions, and informally by night, while downing Coke and Flor de Caña rum that we managed to buy despite the moratorium on liquor sales imposed countrywide during Independence Day week (theoretically to keep festivities tame). We listened to some of the more successful among us give talks on their current work, which I personally found very inspiring. We even had a quite varied and entertaining talent show of about 15 acts on the last night, in which I salsa-ed with Dave, danced in a group of about a dozen of us that performed a hastily but ably choreographed routine to the first half of “Thriller,” and sang “Angel from Montgomery” with two other wat/san volunteers Erik and Justin who played banjo and guitar, respectively. As part of the latter act, Justin also sang a bluegrass song he had written about sitting next to a breast-feeding woman on a Honduran bus ride. The three of us managed to be entertaining enough to win first prize in the talent show, for which we were each awarded 25 lempiras, equivalent to a little over a dollar. I guess I better keep my day job.

The workshop ended Thursday morning after breakfast. I could have gotten on the bus back to Olanchito, but I would have gotten home in the late afternoon and wouldn’t have been able to start work again until the next day. I saw little point in rushing home just so I would be able to go into the office on a Friday, so I decided to take a trip out to western Honduras instead. Western Honduras is not exactly on the way home from Siguatepeque to Olanchito, and in fact is in the opposite direction. But I had been wanting to see more of this country’s mountains, enjoy the cooler climate and see the part of Honduras where most volunteers are placed. As my introduction to the west, I would first visit my friend Brittany, who lives in a small aldea just downhill from the highest peak in the country, Mt. Celaque, and its surrounding national park. Then the two of us would go into Santa Rosa de Copán, a large, colonial and highly-touristed city two hours from Brittany’s site, to attend a goodbye party being held at the group house there for the volunteers who arrived two years ago and made it all the way through their service.

I left Siguatepeque on Thursday morning on a direct bus to Santa Rosa. The direct bus wasn’t all that fast, though, because it was Independence Day and all of the communities along the road were having their parades more or less on the highway. The highway is probably the longest available strip of accessible walkway for those towns, and I imagined that the people in Olanchito were marching down the highway out of town that morning as well, rather than tripping down the residential dirt roads where they had been practicing for the past month. In any case, I had gotten on the bus with Mark, another wat/san volunteer who has already been in Honduras for a year and has been very active in organizing and improving water boards in many communities. He’s therefore interesting to talk to and our conversation was a good way to pass the time. Mark had to get off the bus after only an hour and a half into the ride since he lives close to Siguatepeque, but after he left a Honduran woman sitting next to me struck up a conversation, and she and I talked on and off for the rest of the ride. She was about my age and told me she was studying pharmaceutical manufacturing in Tegucigalpa. She was taking advantage of the long holiday weekend to visit her family near the border with El Salvador.

Five hours later, I arrived in Santa Rosa just in time to catch the bus Brittany had told me to take to get to her site. A taxi driver happily drove me across town to the market where that bus stops before telling me that the bus wasn’t going to come that day because it was a holiday, and then overcharged me for the ride. I didn’t complain about being overcharged and I also didn’t believe what he said about the bus not coming, since I had seen plenty of buses on the highway all day. When the taxi drove away, I asked a vendor at the market about the bus, and as she eyed my duffel bag she informed me that Brittany’s bus actually picked up two blocks away and that I could leave my bag with her if I wanted to go ask the people standing there if the bus was coming today. I thanked her, told her I didn’t mind taking my bag with me and walked the two blocks to find the bus hidden in a small parking lot a block off the road. This counts as a bus station in Honduras, and sure enough when I got to the bus it was about half full. Apparently the bus driver was waiting for it to fill a bit more because we left a half hour late, which surprisingly made even the Hondurans on the bus grumble.

The bus driver didn’t have to worry, though, because shortly after leaving Santa Rosa the bus began to fill. I quickly found myself sharing my bench seat with an entire family: a husband and wife each holding a toddler in their laps. The wife sat next to me and was kind enough to help me when the ayudante came down the aisle collecting fares and asked me where I was going. Despite the detailed directions Brittany had given me over email, I realized that the one thing I didn’t know was the name of her town. So I just said the first name of Brittany’s landlord, Doña Vina, and the woman sitting next to me immediately told me I was going to Monte de la Virgen. She then asked me who I was and what I was doing on the bus. She must have known before I told her that I was going to visit the Peace Corps volunteer who lives next door to Doña Vina, because she was also able to tell me without hesitation the names of the other two volunteers aside from Brittany who have lived in the area for the past two years. She was surprised that I didn’t already know them. Meanwhile, her baby gripped a piece of greasy bean baleada and erratically wiped it on my pants, on the seat in front of us, and on her mother’s white skirt until the woman lifted her shirt and offered her daughter a breast.

Though the bus ride to Monte de la Virgen was only two hours, it seemed long because it was entirely on a rutted dirt road winding precipitously up and down the mountains. The brakes squealed abrasively with each downhill stretch, and more than once the bus just barely squeezed onto a narrow bridge crossing a steep mountain creek. Though the majority of Honduras is mountainous, the majority of my traveling since I swore in has been on the roads that follow the broad, flat river valleys and coastal plains up north. Only once in the past three months have I visited a town in the mountains outside of Olanchito, so I haven’t yet gotten over my fear of bad roads and the precipitous drops that border them in the other 70% of the country. Of course we ran into Independence Day activities even along this primitive road, and halfway to Monte de la Virgen we had to stop for a few minutes to wait for the end of a horse race taking place on the road. We also stopped for longer than usual to let on a dozen teenagers in school uniforms, which I assumed to be half the attendance of the local high school. Near the end of the trip it began to rain, and the bus stopped kicking so much dust up through the open windows.

Finally the bus rumbled past Brittany and three Hondurans standing under the dripping eaves of a concrete building without stopping, so I stood up and yelled urgently, “¡Aquí bajo!” (I’m getting off here!) to get the driver to stop. Everyone on the bus turned to stare at me, and began to laugh, because just then the bus pulled into a short drive and began to turn around. I realized that we were at the end of the route and everyone else on the bus had to get off there, too. So I laughed along with them. I hopped off the bus to greet Brittany, and one of the schoolgirls who had been eyeing me on the bus bounded over and cheerfully took my bag for me. Brittany introduced her as Doña Vina’s daughter. We walked quickly up the hill through the pounding rain to Doña Vina’s house, where we waited out the rainstorm on a couch in the large living room and Brittany introduced me to family members as they passed through. The rain abated to a drizzle, and Brittany led me out the back of the house, through a small plot of shaded coffee plants whose glossy green leaves slapped gently against our faces, across two muddy rivulets and into her apartment.

Brittany and I spent the evening talking and talking. It was the first time since arriving in Honduras that I felt like I had enough time and the right company to have an extended in-depth talk about, well, everything. On Friday morning, Brittany walked me up and down the mountain and introduced me to some of her neighbors, while the German shepherd mutt she inheirited from the previous volunteer, Osita (little bear), ran ahead of us the entire way. The neighbors think Osita is strange because she is playful and healthy. Then we went to an all-day training about group organization and soil science held in the town’s elementary school for local coffee farmers, hosted by a Honduran agency created by and for coffee growers and producers. Doña Vina attended, as did 20 others from Monte de la Virgen and surrounding towns. About ten from outside of Monte showed up piled in the back of one pickup truck. The training centered on a Power Point presentation, but several of the farmers could barely read. I had to fill out the attendance form for a man who could only laboriously print his name. He needed me to write the name of his town and to copy his identification number from his Honduran ID card. He didn’t know how to write in cursive to sign his name after printing it, so I just told him to print it again. The man giving the presentation did ask the group at the beginning of the training who couldn’t read or write, but of course no one admitted it. Only once we began to do group activities involving reading aloud did farmers beg off because of poor eyesight, or because of not understanding the handwriting of the person who had written their group’s information, or for any other reason besides the simple fact of not being able to read. Despite the fact that those that couldn’t read obviously missed the point of a lot of the training, at the very least they were just as capable of learning how to take a soil sample, which we practiced in a nearby coffee plot at the end of the afternoon, and of participating in the group discussions, even if they couldn’t write or read the group summaries. The level of education in the rural areas of Honduras is so low that I’m not even sure if those that could read and write understood any more of the soil science than those who couldn’t.

Friday afternoon another new volunteer from several communities over, Gabrielle, joined us at Brittany’s place. Gabrielle lives only a two hour walk from Brittany, but I’m not sure if that’s up or down the mountain (the cardinal directions are not used to describe location in Honduras), and in any case she arrived on the bus because it was faster. Gabrielle and I caught up while Brittany taught her 7th grade class for two hours after the training, and then the three of us spent the rest of the evening together. Of course a visit to the campo wouldn’t be complete without a candlelight dinner, and though Monte de la Virgen has running water and electricity, a long hard rainstorm knocked the power out for several hours and we dined at Doña Vina’s that night in the dark. Apparently Doña Vina is usually too busy to sit down to dinner, but she graciously sat and ate with us for over an hour. We ate beans and rice, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and thick roasted tortillas with fresh cheese, leftovers from the lunch given at her house for the training. I asked her all about the community water system. Though she’s not a civil engineer, she knew enough to talk fluidly about pipe sizes and tube accessories. I think she’s the kind of woman who knows a little about everything. It was clear at the training that she is definitely one of the rare Honduran campo women who isn’t afraid to speak her mind. And this is a woman who was kidnapped for her beauty at the age of 15 and forced to marry the wealthiest landowner on her side of the mountain. He was shot a decade later for unknown reasons, but probably for cheating on her with the wife of a man more jealous than he was powerful. Widowhood seems to be the most advantageous status for a woman here in Honduras. A widow has garnered respect for having a family, but she no longer has the restrictions that are generally placed on a woman by her husband. She is respected even more for not remarrying after her husband’s death, and so there is less pressure on a widow than on an unmarried single woman to get involved with a man. Some of the most dynamic and independent women I have met here have been widows.

My campo visit ended the next morning at 5:30 am, when the three of us got on the bus going back into Santa Rosa. We headed for the Santa Rosa House, as it is called, to meet up for the goodbye party for the volunteers that are leaving in the next two months. The Santa Rosa House, which is actually a large second-floor apartment, is rented by the 15 volunteers that live in the west and come into the city often enough to make it worthwhile to have a place to crash for a night or two when they are running errands, visiting the doctor, or just partying with other volunteers. It’s the only group rental by volunteers in Honduras, mainly because the highest concentration of volunteers, especially those that live in rural areas with few services in their own towns, is out west.

When I arrived at the house early Saturday morning, I saw that it was pretty much what I had expected of a Peace Corps house. The party had begun the night before, and sleeping volunteers were sprawled throughout three large bedrooms on crude wooden framed beds with naked foam pad mattresses, twisted in their sheets. Two other volunteers were squinting up from underneath blankets on two of the three sofas in the living room, while several others who were already awake bantered with each other and made coffee loudly as if no one else were there. Backpacks, shoes, and several guitars crowded the side of the living room behind the couches. Scraps of food littered the floor underneath the crumb- and grease-covered narrow wooden plank serving as a counter. Dirty dishes were piled high in the pila. I stepped over a pile of empy two-liter plastic Coke bottles to get into the bathroom, which didn’t look too dirty but had a trash can overflowing with used toilet paper and a few too many damp towels wilted on the towel rack. To remove the dust from the bus ride, I took a half hot, half cold shower because the power went out while I was washing. I did feel cleaner afterwards.

By the time I left the bathroom, more volunteers had gotten out of bed and gone into the living room. Some had started on their morning cigarettes, sitting cross-legged in folding chairs near the pile of luggage and blowing smoke through the square openings between the stylized white bars that took the place of glass windows along two of the living room smaller walls. Someone had turned on the TV and a debate over whether Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Sex and the City reruns should be put on the DVD player had begun. A Honduran woman arrived to give hour-long massages for $6 apiece all day. A bed was pulled out from the wall of the smallest bedroom and she closed the door behind herself and the first volunteer, who looked pretty hung over.

I ate a breakfast of bean and salty cheese baleadas with Brittany and Gabrielle at a comedor down the street, where we ran into another volunteer eating with his father who was visiting from the States. After breakfast I went back to the house, chatted with the volunteers there whom I was just meeting for the first time, and helped clean up a bit. By late morning, more volunteers were arriving with each bus that came into town. I spent the rest of the day wandering back and forth between the house and the center of town, shopping and talking with whomever had just come in. In the late afternoon, Gabrielle and I found the first good-quality artesania shop I have seen in the country. The shop had a lot of nice things, and I regretted the fact that the Honduran postal system is so unreliable and expensive that I am unable to send gifts to the States.

Evening set in and volunteers finally began congregating at the house for the party. Those who were staying at the house went into separate rooms to change, while those who were staying at hotels or with the few volunteers that actually live in Santa Rosa arrived gradually. Some people arrived dressed as their favorite Honduran demographic, such as the high school girl/boy (in faux uniforms), the campesino (poor farmer from the country), the Mormon missionary, and the average Honduran man/woman (dressed in anything very tight, very short, very low-cut, and/or very gaudy). Someone started playing the guitar and before long the entire group was singing along to a version of “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” with lyrics that had been re-written to better fit the Peace Corps experience. Once again, Flor de Caña and Coke were flowing. There were body shots. And twelve large pizzas. We had a piropo contest in which we all wrote pick-up lines to each other on scraps of paper and then read aloud the best ones. Angela won the contest as the best piropo writer. She either has an active imagination and a way with words, or else she’s read a lot of porn. A volunteer from the departing group performed an eight-page spoken word piece he had written. A digital photo slide show flipped across the screen of the DVD player. A couple of Hondurans, neighbors of one of the volunteers living in Santa Rosa, were escorted in and generally ignored. I think there was also a trivia contest for the departing group, but by that time I had gone outside to watch the rain with some others from my training group who also had no interest in the inside jokes of the veterans.

At 10:30 pm, one of the members of the house announced that we needed to continue the party elsewhere in order to let the downstairs neighbors (and landlords) sleep, and we all hit the streets of Santa Rosa en masse, notwithstanding the rain. Some of us headed for the bars, but most of us were energized to hit the club and dance. Of course I went to the club, where I paid $1.50 to dance until almost 3 am. It was so nice to hide comfortably in the huge gringo group that I didn’t even mind that the dance music seemed to be on repeat and I heard several songs at least three times. Halfway through the night the DJs started a dance contest on the ledge where the go-go girls were getting down, and some of my friends convinced me and one of the veteran volunteers to get up on the ledge and participate. I lost, but the other volunteer won and we both had fun.

When we couldn’t dance anymore, we dispersed from the club sweaty and exhausted. I walked back to the Santa Rosa house with several others, where we crashed on the still-empty sofas and a few cots that hadn’t yet been unfolded. I slept for less than three hours before being awoken by the early-rising volunteers who started making coffee and bean burritos at 6:30 am, but I had to catch a bus leaving at 8 am anyway so I dragged myself out of bed. Brittany walked with me the half hour to the bus stop, and I relaxed into my seat as the bus pulled out of the terminal, comfortably resigned to sleeping the day away on the almost 10-hour ride back to Olanchito, including one bus change in San Pedro Sula.

As the bus made its last leg through the purple and green expanse of the Valle Aguán just before arriving in Olanchito Sunday evening, I thought back on how full the past week had been, and how fast it was already fading from my mind in the face of returning to my real life here in Honduras: my town, my apartment, my job. And I thought, not for the first time that week, that I had missed Olanchito. I was glad to be home.

Semana Civica

2005-09-11T17:44:00.000-06:00

Honduran independence day is just a few days away. September 15 is their day for parades and music in the streets and what else, I don’t know so far. But in Olanchito, which is locally lauded for its community-mindedness, Independence Day is prefaced by an entire week of celebration called Semana Civica, or Civic Week. Young children, adolescents and young adults each have a day within Semana Civica dedicated to their age groups. On their given day, they parade through the center of town with their classmates and teachers, wearing their respective school uniforms, carrying flags, and playing instruments. Ranchers, farmers and businesspeople all have days of honor as well. A schedule for Semana Civica 2005 does exist, though I only first saw it last night in the hands of my French friend Stephanie, who was given one at the special education school where she teaches three days a week. Most everything I have learned about Semana Civica has been simply by asking my co-workers and other people in town. Apparently everyone who lives here knows quite well what Semana Civica is all about, because I have not seen any signs announcing events anywhere in town.

Semana Civica kicked off this past Wednesday night with the coronation of the town queen. The main intersection in town, the only one with a traffic light, was blocked off for the evening to accommodate a large stage decorated with what appeared to be cardboard cutouts wrapped in shiny pink ribbon. I biked past at 8 pm, an hour after it was supposed to have started, and they were still arranging the decorations, so I decided against waiting it out for however much longer it was going to take to get started. I found out the next day that the coronation ceremony had in fact started at 9 pm, and that the queen (invariably a high school student) was selected based on who sold the highest number of “tickets.” What these tickets are for, I still don’t know, but the mother of the family who owned the apartment where I lived for my first month in Olanchito had earlier lamented the fact that the selection of the queen has become merely a matter of money. Apparently the queen used to be chosen by some other criteria that are not entirely clear to me, but I would guess to be school achievement, beauty, talent or some combination of the three. Thursday morning I asked two of my male co-workers who had gone to the coronation the name of this year’s selection, and it took them a minute to remember. I guess money won out over beauty this year.

There seem to be events planned every night until September 15th, and also daytime activities as well throughout this weekend. But their locations have been different (some in the main intersection, some in the park, some in the plaza) and it has been raining a lot this week and events have been postponed or cancelled, so I haven’t had much luck in watching much of what’s going on. But yesterday as I walked out of the Internet café I did manage to step right into the middle of a cabalgata, a group of about 50 horseback riders prancing through town followed by a truck mounted with loudspeakers blaring a garbled Spanish I couldn’t understand. The horses were strong and healthy looking, unusual in Honduras, and their riders were formally dressed, so I assume it was some type of horse show. The horses had various gaits, most of which involved high-stepping with an unattractive flinging of the hooves outwards as the horses lifted their feet, which I believe was due either to painful shoes purposefully used to create the gait or by the long cut of their hooves. Some horses had a low-to-the ground trot which allowed their riders to ride more smoothly, and some even seemed to have the running walk that I haven’t seen since I was a kid taking riding lessons on Paso Finos in Maryland. Most horses were held on a short rein, foaming at the mouth and with tightly arched necks, looking elegant but uncomfortable. Many of the male riders held bottled beers, and the few women were dressed in tight high-collared tank tops with jeans and spike-heeled boots, like characters in a Mexican soap opera. They pranced, trotted and cantered sporadically down the street in groups of two and three followed by the loudspeaker truck, unexpectedly blocking traffic and instigating a temporary protest of car horns each time a group crossed an intersection. I walked with the cabalgata for two blocks before I passed the house of a Honduran friend whose godchildren yelled my name from behind their gate. They were standing on plastic patio chairs in their dirt yard, peeking through the bars at the horses. I stood outside their fence with them and we judged the horses as they went by until I had to leave to meet Stephanie for dinner.

Unfortunately I have to attend a water and sanitation program workshop in Siguatepeque this week, and so I won’t be in Olanchito on the children’s days this Monday through Wednesday to see their parading. I may not miss much, though. Their performances are no surprise, as they have been heralded by twice-a-day practices through the side streets of town for the past three weeks. Like the smell of roasting green chile in late-summer New Mexico, drum cadences lightened by the tinkling of marimbas (chest-sized handheld xylophones that are played while held upright) and the weak whistling of recorders waft through the air at all hours of the day. If you’re luckily enough to work in an office in the vicinity of a school or three, like I do, and have the chance to hear the practices at close range, they are better described as a pounding racket that reverberates off the cinderblock walls of the neighborhood buildings for a half-hour at a time and makes it nearly impossible to think. When the practicing begins, it’s best to take a break, walk outside and watch the children sweat and kick up dust from the dirt roads as they march off-beat and their music teachers goad them on with whistles, hand motions and dirty looks. Perhaps the only things more distracting from work than the marching practices are the live ants that fly out of the wall-mount a/c above my office computer.

I’ll be out of town for Independence Day, too, but I’ve heard that many cities in Honduras have parades so I’m hoping to catch one, in Siguatepeque or somewhere else, before I return to Olanchito at the end of the week. The fourth of July embassy-sponsored celebration at the agricultural school in Zamorano was a bit slow, so I’m hoping witnessing Honduran independence day will make up for it.

I Heart Tegus

2005-08-21T21:00:00.000-06:00

Somehow I have managed to end up in the capital twice in the past two weeks, which is no small feat given that it’s a 9 hour bus ride one way from Olanchito, at least on the paved road. But I like Tegucigalpa and I don’t mind going, except that the round trip alone takes two days out of my normal schedule. What ends up not getting done is my laundry, which probably brings more suffering to others than to me.

My occasion for going to the capital last week was for the official swearing-in ceremony of the training group I entered Honduras with in May. We were treated to a very nice Honduran dinner on Thursday night, and a short and therefore enjoyable ceremony the next morning, both at the U.S. embassy. There is currently no U.S. ambassador to Honduras, but someone important was there so I think we really are all volunteers now. We were also put up in one of the nicest hotels in town for one night, the hotel Honduras Maya, where we celebrated the night before swearing-in with plenty of rum and cokes (the only affordable alcohol worth drinking in Honduras, and barely worth it in my opinion). A few of us also hit the casino and won quite a bit, though I wasn’t one of those. I was part of the third of us who went dancing for a few hours, though. As soon as our group of gringos showed up at the club, we were immediately told there was a 100-Lempira ($5) cover charge until midnight, which is exorbitant in this country. It was 11:30 so we decided to wait it out by the front door of the place…and within ten minutes they let us in without charging us anything. Though the DJ mainly played reggaeton, which is not even close to my favorite music, we still all had a great time. Our group was split evenly between men and women, and we effortlessly switched partners the entire time so that by the end of the night we had all danced with one another. I hadn’t felt that comfortable in any social setting for several months. When all of the swearing-in festivities were over, it was very hard to leave.

Especially since moving to Olanchito and being on my own, I have been acutely aware of how I act in public, mainly because I was warned in training that Latin stereotypes toward American women take a concerted effort to break. I have been trying hard to not speak or act in a way that attracts too much attention, especially from men. In Olanchito, I haven’t been buying alcohol, I haven’t gone to the disco, and I generally do not speak to or make eye contact with young men when I am walking around town no matter how hard they try to talk to me. I don’t go out after dark unless I am with at least one other person; I am friendly with my mostly male coworkers but I don’t make extended eye contact or conversation with any of them. These behaviors are indicative of a conservative, respectable woman here in Honduras, but they are also directly contrary to how I am used to acting in the States, where I am perceived as respectable without even trying. It takes a constant, conscious effort for me to behave appropriately here.

But even so, I attract a ridiculous amount of attention everywhere. Dollar signs pop into vendors’ eyes when I walk past their stores. Men on the street feel free to make comments to me that they don’t make to the young Honduran women in skintight clothing who walk twenty steps in front of me. And all of this is without me even doing anything. I do believe that it is important to create a conservative reputation with people I spend a lot of time with here, and to act carefully since I am just starting to form relationships. It is also important to act in a culturally appropriate way in order to maintain my personal space and safety. But I am beginning to think that I don’t need to worry so much about what people think of me when I am just walking around town. Given my experience so far, strangers are going to think that I am rich and loose no matter what I am wearing or what I don’t say or don’t do. Besides, how much did I care about what strangers thought of me when I lived in the States?

Instead of heading straight back to Olanchito after swearing-in, I decided to stop for a night in La Ceiba to spend time with Ely, the water/sanitation volunteer who lives there and who I met several weeks ago when he came to Olanchito to visit me for a day. I was feeling pretty lonely, and knowing that my sitemate Lauren and my French friend Stefani were both out of town for the weekend didn’t make returning home seem too inviting. As it turned out, another volunteer Kattrina was also visiting Ely on her way to the Bay Islands for vacation, so I got to spend time with them both. Ely lives in a spare room off a family’s house that is so full of extra furniture that it is basically a storage space, so there were plenty of mattresses to go around. Also lucky was that Max and Lynnette, the two new volunteers from my group that are stationed in La Ceiba, had just moved into town. On Sunday afternoon the five of us went to lunch together at the aptly named Expatriate’s restaurant. Lemons are in season, and I drank so much fresh lemonade that I could hardly eat my food. I count it a victory that thanks to the abundance of lemons (or are they limes?) right now, I can now tell the difference between powdered and freshly squeezed lemonade. I had had so little fresh lemonade in the States that I could never tell the difference between the two previously.

Aside from the excellent company, my second-most important La Ceiba discovery was the SuperCeibeno supermarket. I bought cheddar cheese that 1) melts and 2) doesn’t turn to oil in the process, unlike all Honduran varieties of cheese that are either extremely hard and salty or extremely soft and salty. I also bought kalamata olives. I will have to bring back the American stick butter on another trip.

This past week, my second excuse to go to Tegus was for a water contamination workshop held by the Honduran agency I work for, SANAA. About thirty people from SANAA offices all over the country participated, as well as USAID and Save the Children representatives. I made new Honduran contacts and even some new Peace Corps friends because four other water/sanitation program volunteers also attended. Once again I was put up in the hotel Honduras Maya, and this time my stay included all meals… at the hotel! Mmmm five star cooking…

Going to Tegus generally means spending a good chunk of my monthly salary (which is $280 not including my allowance for rent) on food, lodging, and bus fare, even though I only go if at least part of my trip is covered by whomever requires me to be there. So once again I find myself with ten days left in the month and I am nearly out of money. Hopefully once I get settled in and don’t have to make big investments each month (kitchenware, shelving, bed, phone), I won’t feel so poor. Though that’s probably the point.

Culture shock hits

2005-08-10T21:16:00.000-06:00

For the past week I have been on-edge and cranky, due to the combined stresses of being sick and moving into a new apartment. I have had a sore throat, cough, fever, stomachache, and basically the works for the past 5 days. On top of that, I have been arguing with my new landlady since I moved in at the beginning of the month due to misunderstandings and unmet expectations. One major expectation was that previous discussions I had had with her would be honored once I was ready to move in. This meant that the apartment would be cleaned and repainted before I got there, and that I would be prepared with the first month’s rent and the deposit that we had negotiated.

What really happened is that despite visiting her workplace twice before I moved in to remind her that I was coming, on the day I finally had all of my things packed and had arranged to borrow a truck and the help of a coworker to help me move, she doubled the deposit and wouldn’t renegotiate (and I fought with her for a half hour over it) and she didn’t arrange to have the apartment cleaned until mid-afternoon. By the time I moved in, the windows had been hosed off and the floors had been mopped. But neither the kitchen nor the bathroom had been cleaned; there was still someone else’s toothpaste in the bathroom sink. The walls had not been repainted, either, and were in extremely bad shape from two years of wear from the family of six (in a two bedroom apartment) that had just moved out. A few days later, the meter man came by with notice of several months of past dues on the apartment’s electricity bill. Needless to say I got in another fight with her soon after that. And just two nights ago I noticed that though the landlady previously told me that all the windows have bars, the bathroom window in fact does not. I discovered this while taking a shower and noticing fingerprints in the dust on the window where someone had tried to pry it open from the outside.

As of yesterday, I had managed to convince myself that I had malaria and that my apartment was going to get robbed as soon as I left for work in the morning. I had also anticipated another fight with the landlady over installing new bars on the bathroom window. As it has all turned out, my trip to the doctor today resulted in a double diagnosis of strep throat and intestinal parasites, but no malaria. And my subsequent investigations involving peeking out the bathroom window revealed that there are only some picaro kids who live in the house behind mine, and that shutting the window in a different way will probably keep them at bay for awhile longer. Even better, the apartment has been repainted, and the landlady did not fight with me about the bars when I requested them and will install them next week.

The novelty of living in Honduras is beginning to wear off. This is not to say that new things aren’t still happening to me every day. Rather it is that the routine things that cause me stress are not getting any easier. Constantly getting sick and not yet feeling comfortable with my living arrangements are tiring me out, as is all of the attention I get on the street and the continuing ambiguity of my work responsibilities. There are moments when I want to be home. But there are none when I want to go home.

Endless entertainment in Olanchito

2005-08-09T17:52:00.000-06:00

Though Olanchito has a population of over 20,000, there really isn´t that much to do here. For example, we have no movie theater. This doesn´t bother me in the least since I don´t like going to the movies anyway. But it does show that a town of several tens of thousands in Honduras does not have the same entertainment options as one of a similar size in the States.

But though I feel a little lonely here, I have yet to be bored. Living in an unfamiliar culture provides me with plenty of reasons to laugh, cry, or be dumbfounded, depending on my mood. In the past two weeks, here are some things that have provided a few moments of entertainment:

1) The marriage proposal I received from the man who repainted my new apartment, which he offered to me as a cure for my recent fever and stomachache. According to him, I am sick due to “lack of company.” I didn’t actually understand that I had been proposed to until a few hours later.

2) Reading the gastronomy section of one of the national newspapers, in which the featured recipe for Japanese teriyaki salmon required that the fish first be sautéed in olive oil.

3) Watching the albino lady when I pass her on the street. I have walked past her several times, but I haven´t yet gotten close enough to her to talk to her. I am scared of her. I don´t know why other than that she looks funny. I wonder if Hondurans think the same of me.

4) At work, the air conditioning unit in the office I share is mounted on the wall directly above the desk I use. It works well and not only blows cold air, but also launches ants that have a colony in the wall. I constantly brush them off my keyboard and out of my hair during the course of the day.

5) Sitting on a concrete bench in the central park, on the side facing the Catholic church, trying to guess who will cross themselves as they walk, bike or drive past the church, who will walk in and anoint themselves with holy water, and who will completely ignore it all.

6) My second week here in Olanchito, I accidentally responded to a comment made to me on the street as I walked to work. I couldn´t help it, a twelve-year-old boy calling me “amor” is gross. Even though my response to him wasn´t rude, it was enough for him to know that his comments bother me. Now I´m treated to loud kissy noises and increasingly graphic verbal come-ons every time I pass his family´s business on my way to or from the office. Keeping a sense of humor about this is both easy, because it is ridiculously inappropriate, and hard, because it is so insulting.

7) One of my new neighbors owns a bird that imitates human noises. I haven´t met this neighbor yet, but I may never need to meet him given what I hear from his pet. The bird makes three different types of calls that Honduran men make to women on the street: a two-toned yoo-hoo! whistle, a grating monotonic whistle that means come here! and of course, the wolf whistle. The bird also sings reggaeton, the currently popular dance music that is a cross between rap and merengue. Unfortunately the bird does not rap, but it does chirp a good dance beat.

Re-learning to cook: pasta with pataste

2005-07-23T21:00:00.000-06:00

Since I have learned where the produce market in town is and I have bought enough kitchen utensils to be able to stop eating sandwiches for dinner, I have slowly become more and more accustomed to using Honduran ingredients in the kitchen. I have already tried a number of pre-packaged drink mixes, snacks and Latin American versions of basic cooking ingredients like tomato paste that I have bought at the supermarkets here. But I have been much less adventurous in terms of fresh vegetables. Before today, my typical trip to the market would consist of buying tomatoes, onions, eggs, avocados, mangos and the big bananas that are exported to the States rather than the smaller, sweeter variety that Hondurans prefer. Without even thinking about it, I had been sticking closely to my produce comfort zone, making purchases equivalent to those I could easily make in the States. However, I would also spend a significant amount of time asking vendors the names and uses of items I couldn’t recognize…but without buying any of them. In this way I managed to find the medicinal plant man and to learn that Hondurans think the best way to eat vegetables is to deep fry them with meat, pan fry them with meat or stuff them with meat. The same goes for spices. Ask about the use of a particular seasoning and the answer will invariably be that it goes perfectly on meat. Having now seen two months-worth of dirty, starving and disease-ridden Honduran livestock roaming pitifully through the streets of every town I have visited including Olanchito, I am fairly convinced that my lack of preference for meat will be to my advantage here.

Plenty of culinary adventures can be had without meat, of course. Since an Italian friend in New Mexico introduced me a year ago to the simple but immense pleasure of zucchini sautéed to death in good-quality olive oil with pasta, I have craved it almost constantly. Sadly, zucchini does not exist in Honduras. And all other squashes I have found here are more like pumpkins, with thick skins or rinds that make them unsuitable for pan frying. In an attempt to satiate my neglected zucchini stomach, this afternoon I decided to buy pataste, a long, green (i.e. zucchini-like) vegetable that is easily found throughout the country but generally does not go over well with Americans. The most common complaint I have heard from other disapproving volunteers is that it is a cucumber disguised as a squash and therefore has an entirely unanticipated flavor. Having not yet tried it, I figured I should at least try some experiments.

I decided to forego the advice of the pataste vendor about cooking it with meat and stick to the Italian treatment. After scrubbing the pale-green skin vigorously to remove dirt, I sliced it thinly just as I would a zucchini. Because the neck of the vegetable is ridged, I discovered that the cross-sectioned slices look just like stylized hippie flowers or the Girl Scout emblem. As I sautéed them in plenty of olive oil with salt, a cooking-cucumber smell began to emanate from the pot. So I threw in a little chopped jalapeno with the New Mexican-born hope of fixing the problem. In any case, the flower-slices sure looked cute sizzling away on my one-burner stove. I took a bunch of photos, pessimistically sure that watching them cook would be the highlight of the whole experience. When the slices started curling up and turning brown at the edges, I tossed them with pasta and tentatively tasted the mixture.

In fact, the final product did have a slight cucumber texture. The pataste does not absorb as much olive oil as a zucchini, apparently because of the cucumber-like water content. But…it was good! I will definitely it cook again, which is a good thing because I still have the bigger half of the pataste left. Maybe next time I’ll attempt a classier version with garlic rather than jalapeno, but old habits die hard…

I decided that sautéed pataste in fact looks a lot like enlarged clover and would be a suitable dish for St. Patrick’s Day. I’ll have to find out if they celebrate it here.

The public face of international development in Honduras

2005-07-21T10:58:00.000-06:00

In the past two weeks, I have already been to two celebrations in rural communities sponsored by international development organizations. The first was a mass inauguration of two dozen new potable water systems in the same department (state), all constructed with funds from the European Union. The second was a welcome party thrown by CARE for the new Minister of Foreign Cooperation of Canada (as far as I can tell, CARE is the Canadian equivalent of USAID). This type of event seems to be put on in rural communities that are just poor enough to impress foreign officials but not so poor as to disgust them. Have to drive on badly rutted dirt roads for over an hour to get there? Good. Have to pass people with clothes so torn and dirty you know that they’re wearing half of their entire wardrobe? No event will be hosted there, even if it is a community that recently installed a new water system.

Notable fixtures of the events themselves are 1) a wood-frame shaded stage with a podium, a microphone and a big table where the majority of the foreigners sit, 2) an area facing the stage covered by tarps or thatch with plastic chairs where the community sits, and 3) a bunch of school children in uniform that sing songs and wave hand-held flags of Honduras and the sponsoring country. The excitement may include the gratuitous giving of thank-you plaques and wrapped gifts by the Honduran communities to foreign officials they have never met before, speeches by said foreign officials who don’t speak Spanish and/or don’t know the names of the local partner organizations they are congratulating, the breaking of a replica of the traditional clay water vessel that signifies the end to the need for women and children to carry water from wells or streams to their homes for hours and miles a day, and karaoke.

Though completely contrived, tedious, and so far with exclusively disappointing lunches, these events serve as excellent networking opportunities. As a regional director of the Honduran organization I work with (SANAA), my counterpart is constantly shaking hands and casually asking the slightly less important and slightly less distracted companions of the onstage officials how much money their organization has to spend this year. By following my counterpart around, as a lowly Peace Corps volunteer I have already met one of the national directors of SANAA, the French Canadian director of CARE in Honduras and the Italian director of the EU-sponsored Honduran water and sanitation program PRRACAGUA. I had anticipated that the Peace Corps would provide me with a few international development connections. But I hadn’t anticipated that they would start coming this quickly!

The first 24 hours in Olanchito

2005-07-09T17:53:00.000-06:00

What I found in my new apartment:

1) A single room with a small tiled sink and counter in one corner and a full attached bath
2) A flushing toilet with seat and lid
3) Cement walls and floor
4) A hammock hanging from the exposed rafters
5) A mountain bike with inflated tires and a basket
6) Dust
7) A large hairy spider that even grossed me out in the “kitchen” sink this morning since I forgot to put the plug in the drain last night
8) Large windows on both the east and west sides of the apartment
9) A foam mattress
10) Three scuffed plastic patio chairs, matching scuffed round patio table, and two smaller wooden pieces of furniture that defy easy description
11) A fully functional phone that can make and receive any kind of calls
12) Two National Geographic posters of northern California left by the previous volunteer
13) Three loud, unfriendly dogs that seem to have been attached to 4-foot long chains their entire lives (outside the apartment)
14) A coconut palm with coconuts (also outside)

My first impressions:

1) The mountains here make this the most beautiful place I have ever lived
2) It is cleaner than Choluteca
3) It is not as hot as Choluteca, but
4) It is almost as hot as Choluteca
5) As well as lending me the bike, mattress, hammock and furniture, my landlords fed me coconut fish soup for lunch today and therefore are cool
6) I want to move out of my current apartment as soon as possible because it is small, dirty and ridiculously hot due to the metal roof

Sworn in

2005-07-07T15:37:00.000-06:00

That's right, I am now officially a civil servant. That means that I have to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies and that I am finally a real volunteer. Tomorrow I head to Olanchito, my permanent site near the north coast. Apparently there were some last-minute glitches with my housing there - last week the landlady rented out the apartment where I was supposed to live. So my project manager arranged for me to rent another vacant apartment in her complex. She rented that one out earlier this week. Just yesterday my manager found another apartment for me, but it is just one room and has no possibility of phone hookup. So I'll probably take the next month to look for a more suitable place. Thankfully I have a site mate, another volunteer who has lived in Olanchito since April. I'm sure that will help my adjustment process.

I'm nervous about the move, about starting work, and about not having the constant support from my training group and from the other volunteers in the south that I worked and played with these past three weeks. But I am also excited. I can't wait to see pineapple planatations, Pico Bonito...and the beach!

Two days in Tegus

2005-06-29T09:33:00.000-06:00

Since I left training in Siguatepeque almost two weeks ago, my life has been much more about adjusting to Honduras rather than actually doing any work. Between traveling, getting sick, and waiting out schedule conflicts with Dave’s counterpart, it seems that my job of becoming a water engineer has been temporarily lost in the shuffle. Dave has been teaching me water system design on his laptop to make the best use of our time, but it’s hard to feel that I actually have a job when work generally takes less than two hours each day.

I managed to avoid work for yet another two days by taking a trip to the main office in Tegucigalpa (Tegus) from Sunday through Tuesday. I’m feeling fine, but I had to catch up on vaccinations and other medical requirements according to my accelerated training schedule. It wasn’t the first time I had been to the capital, as I had met Dave there on my way to Choluteca and of course I had flown into Tegus when I first arrived in the country. But it was the first time I had spent more than a few hours there. And it was surprisingly not anything like what I had heard about it.

Tegus is a city of several million residents that geographically resides in a valley surrounded by steep mountains. They are so sheer that the flight into the city is notoriously precipitous: after a descending plane crashed into a main highway near the airport, causing a series of fatal car wrecks in its wake, the top of a nearby mountain was cut off to make the descent smoother and a signal light was installed on the highway to stop traffic every time a plane comes in for a landing.

Among volunteers, I have variously heard the expressions “dark hole in the ground” and “pit” used to summarize the general sentiment toward Honduras’ capital. I have no trouble believing that Tegus has unsavory areas, or even believing that those areas dominate the city. But the reality is that Tegus has some nice areas as well. Aside from the mall, the main office is in one of those areas. Located in Colonia Palmira, the office shares the neighborhood with the United Nations, Continental Airlines, a Honduran bank, DHL international delivery service, a ballet school and a local Mexican restaurant. Just downhill from Palmira are several local bookstores, artesania (handicraft) stores, a Honduran national government building, the central park (with crumbling colonial-era church on one side) and a dozen chain fast food restaurants that would be recognizable in most parts of the US, as well as other usual establishments that a busy commercial area of a US city would have. In Tegus, though, goods are not limited to stores. Entrepreneurs fill the sidewalks and take over narrow streets with their wares as part of an extended outdoor market. Given that the clothing, cheap plastic watch/earring/cell phone cover and fruit stands are packed so closely that their umbrellas completely hide the sun for blocks, and that strolling through the market cannot be done without brushing past other people several times per minute in between dodging water-filled holes in the sidewalk, it should be the perfect place for pickpockets. I haven’t had any trouble yet, though. My own personal observations are that if you are looking for a unique, cute top to go clubbing in, the market is the place to get one. This does not hold true for earrings, however. Unless you like plastic, iridescent and at least two inches long, you’ll have to look somewhere else. Being a fan of cheap but unique jewelry from third-world countries, the latter is particularly disappointing to me. I came to Honduras hoping to augment my collection of seed- and woodchip bracelets and cane earrings, and they are nowhere to be found.

Aside from the somewhat normal shopping options, I think what makes me feel most comfortable in the part of Tegus I’ve seen so far is the lack of dirt and trash. Most streets are paved and accessible sidewalks extend along both sides. Almost miraculously, people with brooms and dustpans appear to sweep trash and leaves away. Including the cooler weather in Tegus, it’s all a welcome change from dusty, smelly, litter-ridden and broiling hot Choluteca. Tegus feels like the big city that it is. Cholu, though it has almost 100,000 residents, has so few paved roads and so much trash that it feels like a small town in New Mexico. And we all know where I feel more comfortable. And I think I can guess which one my future site, Olanchito, will be more like.

A visit to the doctor

2005-06-24T12:10:00.000-06:00

After waking up yesterday morning feeling just as ill as I had on Monday, I decided that my body had not been successfully fighting whatever was causing my mal de estomago. I finally decided to head to the medical clinic here in Choluteca, graciously accompanied by Dave. We arrived at the clinic at 9 am and waited in a line for almost an hour, until we were told that not only was the doctor not yet, but that I was 16th in line to see him. Rather than sit at the clinic with every other patient staring at we gringos for some unknown number of hours, Dave and I went to his office downtown to work on his laptop on a design of a water system that he had done a topographical survey for some weeks previous. After completing the design and attempting to eat lunch, I returned to the clinic and only had to wait 15 minutes before being seen. The doctor diagnosed me with giardia, as I had suspected, and gave me three different prescriptions to treat it. A prescription here is merely a formality and a recommendation, since you can buy most medications over the counter anyway. Interestingly, the prescribed medications were a combination of allopathic and homeopathic remedies. Never before in the U.S. has a doctor suggested a homeopathic remedy such as acidophilus to me, although I have frequently taken it and find it to be effective. I´ve always thought that the medical community in the U.S. is unnecessarily closed to medicines that don´t benefit pharmaceutical companies. Prices of medicines are quite different here, too: a 7-day dose of Cipro costs under $15 here. The monster that pharmaceutical companies comprise in the developed world is merely a kitten here.

An ill-fated trip to the Nicaraguan border

2005-06-22T10:40:00.000-06:00

Since arriving in Choluteca in southern Honduras last Friday evening, I have in fact spent most of my time out of town. Sure, I did spend a day and a half sweating profusely and meeting Dave’s local network here including other volunteers, foreign nationals working for various international NGO’s and several young single Hondurans (at last! but make no mistake, they’re women). But on Sunday morning, Dave and I left town by bus, heading east for the Nicaraguan border. We went to do a topographic survey to determine the feasibility of building a gravity-fed water system in Jocote, an aldea outside of San Marcos.

A colonial town on the Pan-American highway, San Marcos is definitely the most beautiful, and the most comfortable, city I have seen in Honduras so far. Resting in ridiculously green mountains at 6000 feet, its climate is just a touch warmer than San Francisco, California; i.e. perfect. The city center (the only part of the city I saw during my short visit) has almost exclusively paved roads, little dust, very little trash and well-kempt brightly painted buildings of simply adorned architecture. No doubt my positive impression was also fed by a visit to Dave’s friend Hugo, a local with a house that would rival an art gallery and an orchidiery that could compete with a city botanical garden. If you will imagine, please: a full-sized house filled with local artwork and handicrafts that wraps around and opens directly into a centerpiece of banana trees, carnivorous water- and insect-trapping cupped yellow flowers on thick stems and person-high scarlet “scepters,” all crawling with more than a dozen species of variously colored and perfumed orchids. That doesn’t even include the greenhouse on the roof that I only noticed from a distance a day later while walking through town. As my ill luck would have it, the single and very interesting Hugo is gay. But the worst of my luck was still to come, in Jocote.

Jocote is located in the same lush mountains, a half-hour to an hour’s bus ride from San Marcos toward Nicaragua. It lacks both electricity and running water. But the air smells refreshingly of the pine forest that still exists mostly intact there, along with the only remaining cloud forest in southern Honduras. But this visit wasn’t going to afford me the opportunity to enjoy it, even though I had planned to hike with Dave, several other volunteers and a few old campesinos to do the topo survey on Monday and Tuesday. This was because the night before we were to begin the survey, I was struck with my first bout of serious stomach-sickness since I arrived in Honduras.

But before I got sick Sunday night, I did have the chance on Sunday afternoon to stroll through Jocote with Dave and Vince, the volunteer who lives there. Our tour included walking across the lone piece of public infrastructure in town, a cement bridge about 30 feet long and 10 feet wide that crosses a rushing creek. It is apparently the only project the community has rallied around in recent years. On the bridge we were accosted by two over-friendly bolos who kept talking to Vince long after he had tired of their drunken guaro-breath. Escaping them, we squished uphill across a cow pasture until we reached a few boulders to sit on and a few fence posts to throw pebbles at. About seventy pebble-throws later, the owner of the pasture and Vince’s counterpart Javier joined us and entertained us by sharing details of his trip to the U.S. mojado (wetback) in 1996. He seems to be one of the many Hondurans who have illegally made it into, and out of, the U.S. without much trouble from border patrol. About one hundred pebble throws later he finished his story, and we switched to throwing our pebbles into the muddy pond behind us where the family dog was swimming. The dog wasn’t terribly good at fetching, but loves to swim and loves to chase (while swimming) anything thrown into the pond. So Dave and I took turns steering the dog across the dirty pond and back with our pebble-throws, me throwing the shorter distances and Dave throwing the longer. Another hundred pebble throws later, we headed back to Javier’s house where his wife Kenia had cooked us all dinner. Not yet tired, the dog waited for us at the pond and barked for more for another hour.

During our candlelight dinner of beans mixed with some type of ground meat, fresh corn tortillas, fried plantains, cuajada (a tasty mild cheese that is eaten as fresh as possible, but that I have learned to avoid in the campo due to the laxative effect that unprocessed dairy products have on me), coffee and maracuya (passion fruit) juice, we discussed the corruption inherent in COHDEFOR, the Honduran equivalent of the National Forest Service, and its implications for the forests surrounding Jocote. Apparently COHDEFOR has given licenses for small numbers of trees to be removed, mainly those plants afflicted with goropo (bark beetle). But of course these licenses are being abused, and additionally there is the question of whether cutting down the infected trees is actually spreading the bark beetle because it forces the beetles to move more quickly to new, formerly uninfested hosts. After finishing our food, we continued by discussing our ideas for the potential water system, the reason Dave and I had come to Jocote. Due to the very small size of the fuente (water source, in this case, a spring) and its rather far distance from the town, we were doubtful that a typical system of PVC pipes leading directly from the spring to the houses in the town would be affordable. But Javier continued to press us for options and ideas, using his fingernail to scratch a hydrograph into the plaster on the wall, just above the single wooden plank that had served as our dinner table, to show his predicted change in output of the spring through the wet and dry seasons. I tried to help by cupping my hand around the single candle in the room, guarding it against a night breeze that was blowing through the unenclosed kitchen.

I went to bed that night in Javier’s spare bedroom, since it would give the wrong impression for me to sleep in the same house as two single men, as well as for the practical reason that Vince’s place across the cow pasture was barely big enough to fit him and Dave. I think the spare room I was given was larger than the bedroom that Javier, Kenia and their 5-year-old son share. Indeed, the private bathroom off my bedroom doubled as Kenia’s clothing closet. During the inordinate amount of time I spent in the bathroom that night, I was happy to notice that even in a house with no running water or electricity, a woman can still have twenty pairs of shoes.

As it turned out, my one stroke of good luck was having that private bathroom that night. I woke up an hour and a half after going to bed with intense stomach pains. I will not elaborate the entire episode here, for I have learned from spending the past four weeks in the company of other maladjusted gringos that it is all too easy to give unnecessarily exhaustive details of bodily functions. But I will say that even though part of my dinner forced its way out of one end of me or the other (or both) every half hour or more frequently all night, and even though I couldn’t flush the toilet all night because I didn’t have the strength to fetch a bucket of water from the pila (a deep sink that also stores water) in the kitchen so I could use the pour-flush technique, I am now infinitely better. Thanks to the care of Kenia, two other volunteers Hortensia and Chuck in San Marcos, and of course Dave, I am now only suffering from occasional mild stomach cramping. I am still determining if it is necessary to visit the medical clinic now that I have returned here to Choluteca. I have to deal with some medical catch-up in Tegucigalpa at the main office next Monday anyway, so maybe I’ll just see how it goes and talk to the folks there if I’m still feeling ill then.

My self-diagnoses are as follows:
Best-case scenario: temporary virus/amoeba that my body is successfully fighting off on its own.
Worst-case: giardia.

I’m still not sure what has caused my problems. Was it a homemade sweet I bought on the bus? Or the campo food I’m not yet adjusted to? Was it the water that is called “purified” but really isn’t? In any case, I’ll see how I feel in a few more days.

Leaving Siguatepeque

2005-06-16T11:56:00.000-06:00

Today is my last day here in Siguatepeque. Tomorrow I will take the bus to Choluteca, which is close to the coast in southern Honduras. It is really a shame to leave this beautiful place and to leave my fantastic training group so soon. But my accelerated training schedule means that after just 3 weeks of working with current water-sanitation volunteer David in Choluteca, I will get sworn in! July 7th is the date. I still hope to share the swearing-in ceremony with the other trainees on August 12th, though.

In any case, living here in the mountains with mi familia antifirona encantadora and working with the other trainees has been great. (see photo of barrio San Francisco, my neighborhood, above). I will miss them all. But I hope to be back to visit!

Other remembrances of Siguatepeque:

Kate (another volunteer) poses in front of our host family's compound in barrio San Francsisco. I lived in the house visible behind the pink-grated wall. Kate lived in a house further back from the road, also behind the wall.

Plantain tree at the "finca" (weekend home) of the dynamic and well-traveled Alma and Jose Aristides Flores-Castro. (Don't miss the opening plantain flower hanging in the foreground below the fruit!) I spent a Sunday there with 40 members of their family before I left Siguatepeque. Apparently their family gathers there every Sunday. With good reason: the finca includes dozens of different types of fruit trees, a billiards building with a bar and an immense sound system, and a swimming pool (which though extremely dirty all seem to enjoy), not to mention the huge shaded patio around the main house at the top of the hill above it all.

Some of the Flores-Castro family members that I spent a lot of time with that Sunday. Mostly, we danced.

Honduras vs. New Mexico

2005-06-15T18:47:00.000-06:00

No, it’s not a soccer match. It’s my own personal comparison between where I’m living now and where I lived for the past four years:

Honduras	New Mexico
70% mountainous	Average elevation is above 5,000 ft
Pine forest covers mountains	Pine forest covers mountains
Most people know a few words in English	Most people know a few words in Spanish
Black or red beans with every meal	Pinto beans with every meal
Egg cooked into everything (including beans, guacamole and chopped cooked green beans)	Chile cooked into everything (including beans and guacamole)
Receives the most rain from June – Nov, called “winter”	Receives the most rain from July – Sept, called “summer”
Water shortages common from Feb – May, in “summer” (time of hottest temperatures)	Water shortages common from June – Sept, in “summer” (time of hottest temperatures)
Malaria, dengue fever (both mosquito-borne diseases) and parasites are common	Most disease-transmitting organisms can’t survive the desert climate
Land can be privately owned but water never can	Land can be privately owned but water never can
Most of the country is rural	Most of the state is rural
City streets are empty by 8 pm	Towns shut down by 8:30 pm
People walk everywhere	People drive everywhere
Catcalls to women on the street are rare. I imagine this is true in Sigua because people here are relatively well-educated, well-traveled and what I would consider to be polite.	Catcalls to women on the street are rare because no one is ever on the street. They are all in their cars.
Honduran dogs are invariably skinny and stray, though every family “owns” (i.e. gives their trash to) at least one stray dog.	Well-fed packs of stray dogs harass those who dare to leave their cars (in Socorro, not Albuquerque)
Cats almost extinct	Herds of stray cats routinely keep residents awake at night
Poverty rampant	Poverty rampant
Family-oriented culture	Family-oriented culture
Someone in every family owns a gun	Someone in almost every family owns a gun
Historically, serious water rights disputes have been settled with guns	Historically, serious water rights disputes have been settled with guns

I’d say that I feel quite comfortable here in Honduras (at least in Siguatepeque), and I believe that is due in large part to the time I spent living in New Mexico. While living in Albuquerque, I met a former Peace Corps-Honduras volunteer who told me that New Mexico is the only place where he can live in the U.S. because it’s the state most like the third world. As far as I can tell, he’s right. And despite the fact that living in New Mexico was not the happiest four years of my life, the experience has turned out to be useful: it prepared me well for life here in Honduras.

2005-06-08T18:56:00.001-06:00

By the time I reached the training center at 7:30 this morning, it had already been an interesting day.

The day began innocently enough. I awoke early this morning to the sound of the family dog barking. Cariño is a little dog, with a high-pitched bark that by anyone´s account would be considered annoying. Unfortunately, the dog was barking in the backyard, and my small bedroom happens to have its only window at ground level on the backyard side. I keep my window open every night (it has bars and a screen) to keep it cool enough so that I can sleep. So basically, the dog was barking practically right into my ear. And it kept barking for about an hour. Having now become accustomed to sleeping through the family roosters (also in the backyard) crowing at 4:30 in the morning, I eventually started to fall asleep in spite of the dog. And then an explosion blasted me awake.

Shaken so suddenly from my sleep, I struggled to figure out what had happened. Finally I realized that the explosion had been a gunshot at very close range, and that the dog was no longer barking in the backyard. Some neighbor, or the sketchy cousin in the house next door, couldn´t get to sleep due to the noise had finally decided to take matters into their own hands. Or maybe it was an intruder!?! Maybe the dog hadn´t been barking out of caracter endemoniado but rather was warning us that someone was in the yard? I listened carefully but couldn´t hear any other noises in the yard...but then again, my ears were still ringing from the gunshot.

But then I did hear Cariño start to bark again, this time in the front yard. I froze in bed, waiting for the next shot that would do him in, waiting for someone in the house to get out of bed and let him in or to see what was going on. But dogs are not let inside in Honduras. And I live in a house with a host mom who is younger than me and two small children. None of us would be the one to face the neighbor, cousin or crazy drunk off the street with the gun.

I got out of bed this morning at 6 am. With a clearer mind than three hours previous, I remembered New Mexico and a friend there whose dog disappeared once. It was found a week later, shot dead and left in a trash bag on her front step. Thinking of that, I felt sadness for the commonality of cruelty, a practiced sadness that passed quickly. I have witnessed it too many times to be surprised.

The more disturbing and yet more amusing experience before 7:30 this morning occurred at the bus stop. Kate, Lindsay, Javier and I were all waiting at the end of our street for the training bus to pick us up when a one-eyed man with a machete approached us with as friendly an expression as a one-eyed man can have. This is not unusual, as all Hondurans on the well-trafficked streets stare at us more or less surreptitiously as they pass. All four of us greeted this man with an enthusiastic Buenos Dias as we do most others during the gaps in our own conversation. This morning, however, the one-eyed man purposefully walked around we three women and shook hands with Javier vigorously. Barely looking at us, he proceeded to tell Javier that his wife had died and his mother had thrown him out of the house, and could Javier help him get one of these three gringas since he is without a woman now? At this moment, Kate strategically threw in a Lo siento, no entiendo (I´m sorry, I don´t understand), and Javier hinted Que tenga un feliz dia (goodbye and have a nice day!). Meanwhile Lindsay, who barely speaks Spanish, helpfully introduced herself and smiled.

what goes unnoticed

2005-06-07T17:33:00.000-06:00

Somehow it is only today, after almost two weeks here in Honduras, that I realized that I live in a city without potable water. Of course I have religiously avoided swallowing any water that comes out of any faucet (though I have progressed to brushing my teeth with it). I have paid close attention during the training lectures given by the medical staff about washing produce with store-bought cloro (i.e. bleach). I have even kept a close eye on the water level in the pila on the days that the city water is turned off and have watched my host mom Nidia refill it every other day when the water runs. But is just today that I realized that the only immediately potable water available in this town of 70,000 people is from a bottle. And at almost $1 for a one-liter bottle, it’s not cheap. As a comparison, consider that at the city mercado this past Sunday I learned that bananas are three for one lempira, or about five U.S. cents.

Now that I’ve been here for a few weeks, I have talked to enough people to begin to recognize names of places and to make sense of the tourist guidebook of the country that my parents gave me for Christmas. According to the guidebook, Siguatepeque is “set in a broad valley amid highland pine forest in the center of Honduras…it enjoys a cool and comfortable climate.” Given that the weather here feels not terribly different from Washington, D.C. summer, I can only imagine what it is going to be like to work in Choluteca with Dave Lawler (Haverford College ’98) in two weeks in the southern Honduran lowlands. The same goes for my proposed work site for the next two years, Olanchito. Very close to the sweltering Caribbean coast, Olanchito lies “in one of the most fertile regions in the country, the Valle de Aguan…[which] is owned in large part by the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole), and is covered by a sea of banana, pineapple and African palm plantations.” The map in the guidebook also shows that Olanchito is within hitchhiking distance of Pico Bonito National Park, which encompasses part of the 7,500-ft mountain range separating the Valle de Aguan from the coast. Apparently, hiking to the top of Pico Bonito “may look like a relatively short jaunt, but in fact takes a solid 9-10 days of hacking through the jungle while clinging to a steep, muddy hillside, hoping there are no snakes nearby.”

Sweet. This country is definitely going to give me a whooping.