Mother's Day

Mother's Day went without a hitch.  Everyone was so impressed with the dances my kids performed.  We practiced them so many times in music class that it became second nature.  It was one of those moments where you see all of your work realized and you can't stop smiling about it.  We spent the entire morning decorating the stage area for the mothers and it ended up looking for like a Valentine's Day celebration with all the red hearts and love poems.  The decorating and tearing down was so much easier than Father's Day.  I think we perfected the process from last time.

Roots and Wings 3

Here is my latest article about my observations in Guatemala.  Enjoy.

http://rootsandwingsintl.org/blog/2011/05/indigenous-representation/

El Matador Update--Had a great run tonight in the rain.  Set a personal record for the course because the rain kept me cool.  Time was 37:54

Draw Me a Map

I have decided what I am going to do with my month vacation at the end of May.  I will have to leave before the 25^th of May due to my visa situation.  I got to Honduras January 25^th.  After three months here, I renewed my visa for the maximum amount of time, which was just one month, until I could get out of the country to get stamped again.  Classes don’t end until Friday the 27^th, but I will need to leave a couple days before that so I don’t get fined when I exit.  We will be giving exams that week, so I will have to give my exams a little early. 

I plan on catching a bus in Tegucigalpa to Managua, Nicaragua.  I will stay a night in Nicaragua and make my way to Costa Rica after that.  I will need to stay at least 3 days before returning.  The reason for the three days has something to do with the C-4 agreement, which is a trade agreement between Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.  You can pretty much pass freely through the borders of those countries with no problem.  In order to get my passport stamped, I need to go to a country outside the C-4 agreement and wait 3 days.  I know what you are thinking, how painful that I have to spend a whole three days on a Costa Rican beach waiting to get back into Nicaragua legally. 

Unfortunately, I plan to be on a pretty tight schedule and I don’t plan to spend much more than three days in Costa Rica.  After Costa Rica I am going to pass back through Nicaragua and possibly stay a night on the Pacific Coast.  The reason I am not spending much time in Costa Rica is because I am headed back to Guatemala to do some volunteering. 

I talked to the owner of Roots and Wings International and let him know that I have a long break during June.  He said he would love to have me come to the compound and volunteer.  The project is located in Pasac, which is a small town near Quetzaltenango in the Guatemalan highlands.  I will be writing about my experiences in the compound and helping produce some content for their website to promote eco-tourism and volunteer service in the village.  I am extremely excited to head back to Guatemala.  I like going back to places that I haven’t been in a while.  It is an opportunity to sink your teeth into not only how much the area has changed, but how much you have changed since you have last been there.

I thought the students were getting it too easy this semester so I made a packet of study materials for both my classes that were 8 pages long.  The students need to learn all eight pages packed full of information before the exam.  The 6^th graders are definitely ready for more material, but the 4^th grade seems to be stuck in some weird transition period between being babied and actually receiving legitimate English classes.  Some days the kids are attentive and can absorb difficult English material and some days all I can get them to do is color in a coloring book.  I have already seen them grow up so much, but they are nowhere near the maturity of the current 5^th graders.  A lot of growing can happen from now until the beginning of a new school year.

I opened a bank account in Juticalpa today.  It was interesting to see what their process was like.  It was pretty much the same as in the U.S. only there was something a little different about the address part.  She asked us our address, but there really aren’t addresses in our town.  The houses are known by who lives there.  If a person doesn’t have an address, they are required to draw a map to their house.  So each of us had a blank sheet of paper and had to draw a rough map on the city explaining which house was ours.  I guess in case we tried anything funny with our account they would follow the map to our house to collect. 

Stay tuned for pictures of Mother’s Day…

Black Gold

My recent blog on the price of coffee and the implications for the Third World.  You can check it out at the Roots and Wings Blog:

http://rootsandwingsintl.org/blog/2011/04/black-gold/

Work, or Something Like It

After Semana Santa, I was definitely excited to be back to work. This coming month of May represents an entire semester of work--our second semester here. We are trying to pack as much information as possible into these few weeks until we go on break for a month. If the kids are anything like how my friends and I were during summer break, they won't study or retain much of the information they have already learned. All of us are trying to establish some goals as to where exactly we want to stop.

I thought Father's day was ridiculously overdone, but when I asked about the Mother's day festivities to take place next Thursday my boss told me to times the Father's Day celebration by 2. All of the foreign teachers were just told about Mother's day about a week ago. We weren't given a specific date as to when it would take place. Apparently it is going to take place sooner than we thought and we are not ready. Although the fathers are paying for school, it seems that it generally isn't their responsibility to worry about their children's education. My boss told me that the mothers will be watching every little thing the kids are doing and will openly critique the activities; so, basically, don't screw up.

If I thought I was going to be able to get any serious work done before break I was mistaken. When I say serious work I mean teaching English. In the next week the students and I need to prepare a homemade gift for the mothers and it better be creative. To add to the pressure, we don't have a full day tomorrow due to student elections. There are two political parties that formed in the school--F.U.D.E. (I don't remember the acronym) and Estrellas del futuro (Stars of the Future). Many of my students have been out of class all week campaigning and buying votes by giving candy out. Like true politicians, both sides are promising some big changes and are proposing projects that they will make sure get done--no one has figured out where the money is coming from yet. I have never seen so many students so aware of politics, even if it is only at an extremely local level.

In what is going to take about 15 minutes to vote, my boss gave the school the afternoon off. Honduran Labor Day is this Sunday so we don't have class on Tuesday--If you think this seems random that's because it is and it makes absolutely no sense. Mother's Day is Thursday so we aren't going to have classes, just a two hour assembly. Friday we aren't having classes for no apparent reason at all, maybe because we didn't have classes on Thursday and they want a long weekend. This no school thing is getting a little ridiculous. I know it is probably a cultural thing, but I would at some point actually like to get some work done. We are strapped for time anyways because of the upcoming month long break, and now I have to prepare a song for the moms and a homemade gift.

To top it all off, I was sick this weekend and the beginning part of the week. Diarrhea during school hours isn't pleasant since the seat-less toilets are a glorified outhouse that smells of humid, rotten excrement. I had to visit the bathroom 6 times one morning. I was trying to keep myself hydrated in the subtropical heat, but every time I put liquid into my body it flushed right back down the other end. It is only when I am fighting travel sickness that I feel at all homesick. It sure would be nice to have the comforts of the developed world when you have explosive diarrhea.

We are inching closer and closer to break and I have yet to lock down plans for a volunteer project. I would like to keep myself busy in June doing something anywhere but here. It will be nice to live another place for a while and have a chance to miss my current situation. If you have any suggestions please let me know…

C.S. 100 Dollar Challenge: With 100 U.S. Dollars you could buy 210 pounds of pasta.

Roots and Wings International

I am the newest edition to a blogging team for a nonprofit that does work with the indigenous in Guatemala.

I will be posting links here on "Blogging Honduras" to the "Roots and Wings International Blog" so that you can keep up with my writing.

http://rootsandwingsintl.org/blog/2011/04/nonprofit-in-the-news/

Amazing Race: Tegucigalpa

As I locked the gate behind me, the wind bit my cheek with cool morning air.  Although it was unseasonably chilly that morning, I knew that when the sun came up it was going to be hot.  I had gone to Tegucigalpa on this same early morning bus, but never alone.  In all my travel experience in Central America, I rarely have the opportunity to travel alone, which is something that I very much like to do.  I sat on the curb of my street corner 15 minutes early waiting for the bus to make its 5 o'clock pass.  Tick-tock went the clock and soon enough 5 o'clock was history.  Besides a few women carrying fresh ground corn meal on their head to make tortillas, the town was dead.  Thursday, Friday, and Saturday San Francisco de la Paz was completely shut down.  No stores, restaurants, or businesses of any kind functioned.  I had a fear that the bus wasn't working either, but I thought I would try anyways.  When I finally realized the bus wasn't going to come I had a few moments of panic which in turn blended to anger.  I knew what I had to do.

Chad was the name of the Peace Corp volunteer who recruited me to teach English in Olancho.  My impression of Chad is that he is quite the character.  Chad is very popular among his Peace Corps peers, so whenever I meet a PC volunteer I just mention that I worked with Chad Ryerson and they normally have a good story to tell.  Chad is a story teller himself.  When I first got here he made sure to tell me every good and bad story he had about the past two years he spent in Olancho.  Stories included watching someone being shot and burned alive on the side of the road and witnessing fatal car accidents.  None of this bothered Chad one bit.  He has the ability to separate his life from the world spinning around him.  I think this helped him function so well as a volunteer.  I met a Peace Corps volunteer recently who spoke of Chad, "Chad is such a goof ball, but for being such a goof ball he accomplished so much in his time here."  The Third World atmosphere never seemed to phase him, considering the murderous things he saw and the many robberies in which he was a victim.  For the first part of his deployment, Chad was dating another PCV who was stationed on the other side of the country.  Chad would go see her when he could, but the bus system from Olancho is quite difficult.  Normally, in order to take a trip from Olancho, you first need to go to Tegucigalpa, the capital and hub for bus routes.  This is often incredibly inconvenient and expensive.  On one occasion, Chad bought a bushel of bananas, hitchhiked for 14 hours to his destination, and gave a banana to each car that gave him a ride.  Chad said about this experience, "I have never felt more alive than when I was hitchhiking in Honduras--especially on the back of motorcycles.

Now, I didn't expect to have this same experience with the same amount of risk, but I knew if I wanted to get to Tegucigalpa to make my hotel reservation and renew my visa, I would have to hitchhike.  I left the corner and went home to grab an extra bottle of water, not knowing what was in store for me, and set off on foot toward the main road leading out of San Francisco.  I tried a couple times to flag down cars but to no avail. If I couldn't get a ride, maybe I would just walk the 300 km.  As I was trying to flag down another car I spotted two women at a bus stop with luggage.  "Where are you guys going?", I asked.  "We are going to Juticalpa.  The bus is coming at 6."  "Do you think there is a bus from Juticalpa to Tegucigalpa?". I said.  "Of course, they leave every hour on the hour."  Crisis averted.

I knew from my experience in Guatemala that going to the immigration office to get a visa renewal is painful.  In Guatemala I had to leave my passport there for a period of time and come back a day or so later to pick it up. You don't want to lose sight of your passport in a country like Guatemala.  You may never see it again.  Most of the others I was traveling with were under the impression that we would arrive at the office and they would just stamp our passport with a smile and we would be on our way.  Not quite.

It was like an Amazing Race scavenger hunt.  It made me realize that government anywhere in the world is ridiculously inefficient.  First of all, Hondurans hold little regard for the concept of a line.  People would blatantly cut in front of you and not even act embarrassed about it.  After a while, I just started cutting back.  We waiting in the immigration line for a good 15 minutes.  When I got up to the window I told the lady I needed to renew my passport.  She gave me 5 forms to fill out and told me to make a copy of one of them and get back in the same line.  Task number one: Fill out paperwork and make a copy.  After a copy was made and paperwork was filled out to the best of my ability I got in line and waited.  When I got to the window again she looked through the paperwork, barked at my mistakes, and gave me my next task.  Task number two: go to the bank, any bank, and pay 380 Lempiras into the office of immigration account and come on back and wait in the same line.  At least the bank had air conditioning.  I waited at least a half hour in the line at the bank and finally got my receipt of payment.  I returned to the immigration office, waited in line, and got up to the window.  "Give me your passport", she said.  "We will call you when it is ready."  Immediately after she sent me away she went on lunch and there was only one other lady working.  The passports didn't get stamped for another 30 minutes.  They called me up to the window after all my friends had already received their passports and said, "I am going to need to see your passport."  Did they not understand why I had been waiting for the last 30 minutes?  You are supposed to be stamping it right now!  Finally, after a scavenger hunt and over 500 lempira in fees and cab rides we were done.

We were traveling with two other Americans in Tegucigalpa who work at another similar school in Juticalpa.  They are both from Columbus, Ohio, which was weird.  Then, when we were waiting three hours for the next bus to Olancho, I spotted a blonde girl across the bus station with a University of Arizona bag.  I went up to her and said, "Excuse me, did you go to U of A?"  She did in fact go to U of A.  Not only did she go to U of A, but she graduated the same year as me.  We both agreed that we had been missing Tucson.  We both hadn't been back since we graduated.  I asked her where she is from originally.  "Ohio", she said.  Small world, I guess.  She is a PCV in just outside of Catacamas.  It will be good to have another Ohioan and fellow U of A alumn around if I get homesick!

On the bus ride back, I was bored from the day of bureaucracy so I decided to take a bunch of pictures of Tegucigalpa as we left the city.  Don't know how they turned out because we were moving, but I am going to post them anyways.  There are also a couple from the river we swim in.  

S