Letting go...

Every time I go to take a look at my blog and consider updating, I am overwhelmed with a nauseated feeling, as I realize the great distance between my last post and today. So many todays have passed and yet I still have not sent an update. I suppose it is a mix of the day to day busyness, the additional projects I have going on right now (job searching for next year, finishing up some overdue knitting projects with a shipping deadline), and... the heat. We were fortunate to hold on to mid-80s weather until about the beginning of April, when the farmers started burning the fields and all of Honduras, it seems, was enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke and dust. Now, day and night, we drive and cycle and walk through smoke-filled air, our shoes caked in dust from the dust drifts that build up, especially on the sides of the highway on the walk back to our neighborhood. The beautiful low-lying mountains, Juticalpa's one beauty, can barely be seen through the haze. This past week since Semana Santa (Holy Week) has been the hottest yet in the Honduras dry season, with temperatures reaching the 90s during the day, dropping to the 80s at night, but the forecast reports "feels like 100s in the day, 90s at night". Having lived in both the plains of North Texas and sub-tropical south Texas the past 20 years of my life, I am no stranger to the heat. Unlike the Northern Californians in our group, I understand terms like "heat index" and "smog alert". I don't think Honduras understands what smog is, or they wouldn't be creating so much of it. The Semana Santa vacation was a fabulous and much-needed break, but the return to school this past week with 100 degree temps and no breeze (since the smoke is blocking it all out) was a bit much for me to bear. I think my students agreed. We trudged back to school Tuesday morning, plodded through the typical first day back to school doldrums, and by Wednesday were hit with a heat wave so strong that it zapped us of whatever little energy or motivation we have left. My students were literally melting in their little wooden seats, and I had barely the energy to stand at the front of the classroom and pretend like we were learning something. By noon, I was looking into the faces of tired children with sweat dripping down from their foreheads and big beads forming on their upper lips. When children are sweating, not after running around at recess but simply from sitting, very still, in their chairs.... that is a hot day. Since it doesn't cool down much at night, that makes it hard to sleep restfully, so everyone gets back on the bus at 6am the next morning, without even the typical cool breeze from the open bus windows, and by the time we arrive to school at 6:45, our clothes are wet through and we wearily trudge off the bus. Well, the teachers at least. The kids have been jumping up and quickly queueing to get off the bus, contrary to their usual morning lingering, where many of them pretend to be asleep in the hope of being left behind. They are probably so hot they just want to get out as quickly as possible.

To add to the heat, there is also the ever-ephemeral nature of electricity in Olancho. Around the same time that the farmers really got going with their pyrotechnic activities, we also started experiencing the joys of power surges, which are surpassed in enjoyment only by power outages. 36 hours before the beginning of our Semana Santa vacation, a farmer burned his fields along with 25 km of electric poles, cutting power to the entire department of Olancho (which, according to Wikipedia, covers a total surface area of 24,351 km² and in 2005 had a population of 458,365 inhabitants, so there are probably a few thousand more of us 6 years later). Of course, very little if any information is known about the situation when these things happen, so it was not until 6 hours after the outage that we were aware of why the power was out, and no one could determine exactly when it would be back. At the rate we've seen electricians working on electric poles at the Catholic University, we weren't sure it would return before we left for vacation. This was all very well, considering we were about to leave for a week and I didn't really care- I could stick out one more day of eating peanut butter sandwiches and not using my computer. However, the water was also cut because both our neighborhood and the school use electric-operated pumps to pump water from their wells. Since Anne and I don't even have a functioning pila (a large bath tub-like basin that is used to retain water), the thought of leaving our toilets unflushed and dishes unwashed for a week after 36 hours of use, well, that was a little gross. Most of our students didn't even show to school on Friday, though we continued with a short day until 11:30 and the foundation brought in a generator (to make food in the cafeteria and, of course, to heat up the kids' lunches in the microwaves). Thank God, someone got busy fixing the power lines. The electricity came back on at about 8:00 Friday evening, and I wasn't scheduled to leave until Saturday morning. While we were on vacation, we heard news that the power was out again in Juticalpa, and then the day after I returned it went out for a few hours in the evening (not usually a problem, but I was in the middle of a load of laundry at my next door neighbor Reina's house, and my clothes were stuck in the rinse cycle for several hours, until I decided the power was not coming back on and went over there to start wringing out my clothes and towels while Reina held a lantern for me to see by and we swapped stories of our beach vacations). Never a dull day in Honduras!

Elsewhere on the home front, Anne and I have mourned the loss of our washing machine, which went through a series of very unpromising grunts and groans and refused to start up one Saturday morning at the end of February. After 4 visits from Tony, OAF electrician, the last one accompanied by a private co. electrician, they decided it was irreparable, and since a new one would cost less than the repairs, adios a la lavadora. It still sits precariously stacked together in our gloomy pila room, an addition to the collection of broken and unusable items that the room houses. However, at least the old thing made it through as much of the year as it did- I'm sure we were tiring it out as we are rather fond of doing laundry. And we have generous neighbors who allow us to use their machines. So every other weekend, we make a trip across the circular drive of our little neighborhood to load up Dan & Mario's washer (which works a lot faster with the benefit of their functioning pila. We dump about 5 buckets of water from the pila into the washer and we're good to go, versus the, for me, odious task of standing in the ooky pila room at our house, holding the laundry bucket under the steady trickle of water that comes out of the pila faucet- I think there may be tree roots strangling the pipe underground). So, when the usual amenities change, we find a way to make it work. Hand laundry probably doesn't get our clothes as clean, but then who are we kidding anyway? They will just get sweaty and dusty again the next time we wear them. ;)

Which brings me to the topic of this post: Let it go. The thought was called to mind yesterday afternoon, when we were all ready to leave school at 1pm after an exhausting week of heat. Peggy, our directora, was in Tegus doing some business, and we didn't have our normal Friday afternoon faculty meeting. At the last minute, our Honduran directora called an emergency faculty meeting to discuss an incident that had happened that afternoon on the field, in which a child broke his arm. It was a frustrating meeting for us, as most of us had nothing to do with the incident and, in any case, it was an accident. 5 minutes and we had missed our chance to leave at 1:00. But I found it hard to get upset over, as we a) had no control and b) it was a bit more time for me to get some things done so I didn't have to lug so much home with me and c) I sort of feel sad for the Honduran faculty and directora, as the cultural and facility standards of Honduran schools make it very easy for accidents like these to happen. It is sort of amazing to us U.S. teachers that a child has not been severely injured yet this year. From time to time the slabs of glass in the window panes slide out and crash to tiny shards on the tile floors, and a few times have missed kids' feet by mere inches. Twice, when pulling aside the curtains in my classroom, the entire metal curtain rod (a length of about 6 yards) has slipped through the wooden rod holders and crashed onto a child's desk, and one time actually hit a child, but fortunately only on her shoulder and not her head. The end is open metal, so it could easily cut into someone's scalp and cause a major head injury. During catechesis class with the Franciscan nun on staff, the door to Jeff's 6th grade class slammed shut as a gust of wind blew through the open windows. The force of the door slamming shattered the glass door pane to pieces (a surface area of about 1 yard squared). Now he teaches with a door that has a big hole in the center, although I don't suppose the glass was really blocking out much sound anyway. The point is, on top of these dangers within the classroom itself, the children run around through the fields in front of and behind the school all the time during recess, 3 grade levels at a time. Regardless of how much or little supervision is provided, the campus grounds are a wilderness, so there are snakes, tarantulas, the gardener's 3 dogs, and an array of other wild things roaming about that are potentially hazardous. I mean, we did, in the first month of school, give a classroom full of 40 kids a wooden bat and let them run and jump on top of each other as candies flew out of swinging piñatas... the upset about accidents just seems a little delayed.

I hear myself sounding cynical and judgmental, and that is not what I am here to do, nor do I want to paint the school in a bad light. I am sure that our facilities, rudimentary as they are, are far better than those of the public schools in town. It is just another of the cultural frustrations we U.S. teachers are faced with here, and I am quite sure our school culture would be met with criticisms to the contrary if the Honduran teachers went to teach in the U.S. The legal ramifications of school-related accidents in the States have become fairly unmanageable and definitely have made school less fun and experiential for kids. Don't run! Don't climb up there! Don't walk in front of the swings! Don't do anything that will hurt yourself, because you're a kid, and kids aren't supposed to ever get dirty or get stung by a bee or fall off a swing, because there will be miles and miles of paperwork involved, and we might be sued because you were behaving like a kid. So teaching in Honduras has its benefits, for sure. When the recess bell rings, my students continue to slip and slide through the tile hallways, tackling each other and joking around for a few extra minutes until I tell them, "That's enough now. Get in line if you want a ticket." And when a tarantula crawls into the classroom, we interrupt class for a few minutes so the brave kids can come up and wave the door back and forth a bit, trying to get it to crawl in between the door jam so they can smash it with a hefty slam, until I hear myself saying, "Come on now, don't kill it! Move along outside now, you hairy spider, where you belong."

I have always been rather fond of spiders, dating back to the days when I was stilling waddling around in Pampers, waving to the daddy long legs that gathered in large, spindly globs in the corners of the front porch at our house in North Carolina. I'm sure E.B. White had something to do with my childhood affinity for spiders-- not the enormous, hairy, kind in horror movies that gobble up humans like they are tasty fly snacks-- but the industrious, intelligent, helpful ones. Unless is is about to attack me, I can consider pretty much every spider (except for the ones I believe to be poisonous) to be a bit like Charlotte. Certainly the little spiders that live in my bathroom have been an enormous help to me in keeping down the insect population. Just this morning I whisked down a huge web full of some sort of bugs from the shower ceiling. (Random question: is there a difference between a cobweb and a spider web? Are cobwebs merely accumulations of dust, or are they a combination of spider webs and dust? Whatever they are, I have both in my bathroom). I figure little Charlotte can't possibly eat all of those bugs, and she will industriously re-start her web in a new location and will have it up and running full speed before next Saturday's cleaning. Now if only she would find a way to rid my bathroom of the armies of ants that parade across the walls day in and out.

Anne and I have identified 5 different species of ants that live in our house, ranging in size, color, and ability. There are the big, red, soldier ants, sort of like the leaf-cutter ants that have a big house in our front yard, except they never seem to be cutting leaves and don't have the big pinchers for gripping like the leaf-cutter ants. There are the equally large, orange-colored ants with a globe-like white abdomen, that also have wings and fly annoyingly onto my computer screen when I am working or watching DVDs at night. There are the tiny, frantic sugar ants that almost appear to be flying in little swarms across the bathroom walls, in frenetic haste to go God knows where and do God knows what, because they never seem to actually make it to one direction or the other, but continue dashing frantically back and forth on some unseen business. Then there are the carpenter ants, or at least that's the closest I can come to explaining them- small, dark-colored with long tentacle-feelers searching out the territory ahead of them. They tried to build a home under a big crack in our living room and actually made progress lifting the grout and leaving fine, sawdust shavings in little piles all along the crack, until the tile looked like it would fairly pop out altogether. Several insecticide sprayings seemed to take care of the problem for the time, although they may be back. The volunteer who lived here last year told us she had termite ants in her bedroom door, which she could hear gnawing from the inside out at night, until finally the maintenance guy came and removed the door and gave her a new one. They are at school too, gnawing at the kids' wooden desks and leaving fine sawdust piles on the floor. Mary, the 5th grade teacher, started reprimanding a student for leaving his pencil shavings on the floor, until she realized it was the carpenter ants at work. Finally there are the ugly small black ants that have also invaded our kitchen, that come out of nowhere and amble lazily about, not seeming to be particularly attracted to sugar or water, which grosses me out because their behavior is so like that of the cockroaches.

And the cockroaches, unfortunately, appear to be back. Maybe it was just our week vacation that brought them out to party and our return that made some of them unfortunate victims of the sole of my cockroach-killing shoes. The last two have been the flying kind, though, so it is not a pleasant event. Still, it's not yet enough to make me seek shelter under my hot mosquito net again, so... back off, roaches! I live here, too.

I realize that this post is largely a vent on the physical frustrations of life here, something I am sure is brought on by the recent heat wave and return to work after an amazingly refreshing and fun week of vacation in a country that can scarcely be recognized as Central America, after living in central Honduras for 8 months. That said, I am off to record my musings from that happy week, so you can see that this land is beautiful and richly blessed with wildlife and awesome scenery, for all its modern shortcomings. When I think about the day-to-day frustrations I've been faced with at home-- my car getting towed, stuck on hold for hours with Internet connection issues, flying gnats in my apartment (yes, even nice apartments in San Antonio have bug issues)... it's really not such a bad trade-off. I talk with the other volunteers here and we agree that here, the frustrations are usual physical and immediate in nature- it's annoying when the power goes out or it's really hot that day, but you know the day will pass, the power will eventually come back, the day will eventually end and the screaming, overly-excited children will go home. But, at least as a teacher at our Honduran school, you don't have the stresses and pressure that a work environment at home usually entails-- deadlines, meeting after meeting, testing requirements, co-worker relations-- or the stresses of living back home-- bill payments, car maintenance, the constant onslaught of consumerism that manifests itself in the form of junk email and junk paper mail and unwanted phone calls. And when the power does go out, there are only 10 other people at the Texaco, the one public location in town with free Wi-fi, as opposed to the typical 40 people crowded into an urban area Starbucks at any given time on any given day... and they have full power and Internet access available for them at their houses. I can only imagine how Starbucks would be affected by a 24-hour power outage across the city of San Antonio, if they were the only locations in town with a generator. An additional benefit of this remote, half-modernized location is that, because my fellow U.S. colleagues and I get along so well together, we have a constant friend group that is ever-present and ready to socialize on the weekends, or pretty much anytime after our long day's work is done. There is a running joke whenever someone schedules an event: "Clear your calendars, everyone." In short, it feels sort of like going back to college again, except that you're surrounded by Spanish speakers and fight daily to be heard above the din of raucous children from every surrounding wall... ok, that's a far cry from my pleasantly air-conditioned, small class sizes back at Trinity, where I sat for hours and dished literary analyses of books. But socially, at least, it's similar to college. The latest social event is entitled: High Tea at 5pm on Saturday in honor of Prince William's royal wedding, for which I need to leave the house in half an hour to stop by the Fruteria and buy the makings for cucumber sandwiches. If you've been following my posts, you can guess who planned this one. We will be debating the topic: Should Great Britain do away with or preserve the royal monarchy? As always, it should be interesting.