Looking up.

After a very long and tiring week of school (2 more to go- YAY), Anne and I have had a quiet, restful Saturday. I don't know if I've ever talked about the routines we've formed here in our little Honduran household. I guess it's sort of boring stuff to talk about, but the repetition and rhythm of household chores and meals is a comfort of sorts. I am so grateful to have a roommate who loves to clean as much as I do, because in Honduras you simply cannot go long without cleaning. Every Saturday morning Anne is up before dawn for an 8 mile run, and while I have difficulty instilling a desire to do the same, I must set the alarm to be up by 6:30, when Adrain, the Aguazul man who delivers to Santa Clara, makes a special stop through our neighborhood on his way down the highway for his morning rounds. Anne was able to procure such service after the other Aguazul man who used to sell us water from his house moved his family out of our neighborhood and to the States. It is not a fun trek to carry one 5-gal. jug at a time from the mini-mart a quarter mile up the highway, especially when it's so hot you're going through 5 gals every 2 days. Anne has Amazonian strength, but I'm afraid I do not. I make the coffee right away, just in case it is a no-power day (as today) and the power goes out at 8am. Anne returns and sweeps the entire house, which is filled with dust, spider webs, dead June bugs and flying ants. Then we mop the entire house and give our bathrooms a thorough scrub. We tag team and have refined it so this entire process takes about 2 hours. Afterwards we take showers and enjoy a Saturday morning breakfast of oatmeal and watermelon. I didn't used to eat oatmeal until La Colonia started selling brown sugar. I can only eat oatmeal if it has brown sugar and other goodies in it. My current oatmeal of choice contains brown sugar, one pat of butter, one sliced apple and a handful of chopped pecans (still rationing from the Christmas stock I brought down). I realize this entire process must sound incredibly mundane and boring, but it is a small joy in my life here to sit with my coffee and oatmeal with those pecans that are like gold to me in this place where nuts are an oddity, and enjoy reading a book for a few minutes before I realize it's noon and I need to begin the lesson-planning or grading or whatever it is I need to get through that day.

Today I just could not pick up a school-related assignment, and Anne suggested we go for a picnic at the University. Padre Ricardo has been out of town in the States for several weeks due to a scheduled surgery, and he told us we were welcome to stop by and pick mangoes off his tree while he was gone. Padre is always giving us fruit and veggies from his personal garden. It is a great treat, as even in a tropical country, the remoteness of our location makes it difficult to get some types of produce that are particularly fresh or flavorful. He gave Anne all of his papayas, since he doesn't eat them (and I don't care for them either). Now that it's mango season, we are enjoying the massive mangoes from his tree and our neighbor Reina's smaller ones that sometimes drop into our yard. So we grabbed Dan and headed down to the University to shake the mango tree and spread out our picnic under a huge shade tree. Juancito, the University gardener, showed up (probably to investigate the vandals that were batting at Padre's tree with long sticks) and nimbly climbed the tree to knock down even more mangoes from the higher branches. We hung out and learned a complicated card game (from Anne of course) until the sun had moved our shade considerably. The University is such a beautiful and green oasis. I believe it is the most beautiful location in Juticalpa, probably with our little neighborhood a close second. Even the Parque Central downtown is a bit drab and graffiti-ed. Aside from the construction of the new building, which is coming up quickly and looks rather impressive compared to the original two corridors, it was so quiet and serene, with the birds chirping and the flowers blooming and the grass, now green from a week of rains.

The other afternoon I was walking home from the fruteria after school, weighed down by my backpack and plastic bags of vegetables strung from each arm. I narrowly missed being buried under a pile of dirt higher than my head as the bulldozer sluffed off several hundred pounds of wet-packed earth from the area they are leveling for a store opposite the Shell station. No zoning laws or orange construction tape here! And a fine time they chose to begin construction, as the rainy season is kicking into gear and the streets are turning to mud. But then, walking up the long stretch of highway to my neighborhood, I noticed the bright red blossoms of the tropical trees bursting in bloom above my head, the area near the river alive with green after only two weeks of rain. And I remember something Anne and I had talked about recently, when realizing for the first time many aspects of our neighborhood (was this tree always here? did that tree have fruit before? did Reina's house always have those bushes lining the front walk?). We are so busy, or so intent on making it from point A to point B without getting propositioned, or flayed with dust, or stepping in some ooky trash or mud... that we forget to look up. And I realized that last week, possibly the worst week since I arrived... I was forgetting to look up. To look ahead, or behind, as it may be... and to see that road traveled so far, and how far my students have come since that first day. To see how far I've come, all of us volunteers have. It is an accomplishment, and no matter how short we feel that we've fallen of whatever our original goals or expectations for our students-- they have made considerable progress, and under less than perfect teaching and learning conditions. And that should give a sense of fulfillment and purpose. I deserve to feel that. And so do my students.

So apparently my life has not been boring enough until this moment, when I was looking up a word on Merriam-Webster.com (yes, on a Saturday night- yes, I agree with you...) and came across their slang words section, where users can post their own words in the hope that one day, they too will enter the Merriam-Webster as legitimate additions to the English language. So I came across a pre-coined word that connected with me and my Honduran lifestye:

numismaphobic (adjective) : having a pathological fear or loathing of coins

Lol this is what I've become after living in Honduras for 9 months. The centavos that you get as change at the supermercado are only good for use at the supermercado to avoid receiving more centavos. No one else keeps them in the cash register, so unless they happen to have exact change for you from the last customer, they end up offering you Honduran candies or chiclé instead. I loathe the Honduran centavo coins. They are many different sizes and amounts, and neither appears to have been minted with any rhyme or reason, so that the tiny one that is impossible to read the printing on (especially in the poor natural lighting of a Honduran grocery store) could be worth 5 centavos or 20 centavos. I usually end up just cutting my losses and waving away the free chiclé, which I am sure will taste gross and merely rot my teeth even faster, considering I haven't seen a dentist in over a year.

Funnies from the week:

My classes are writing "The Important Thing About Me" poems as part of our end of the year activities. I'm trying to salvage my UbD unit that I wrote last summer and never completed at the beginning of the year as planned, because their English was so low. I was sitting with Maho and Naomy this afternoon in our sauna-hot classroom, trying to give Maho a little self-esteem boost (as he practically dozed off as I was going on in English about perseverance and all of his talents). We managed to make a long list of Maho's talents (including making horse noises, which he demonstrated quite efficiently)... and he even added brightly "I speak English!" which is a huge improvement over the Maho I knew at the beginning of the year. Naomy is an intelligent girl but needs a lot of attention. After much pleading for her to find her English notebook so we could get started listing her abilities, she finally got organized and needed little prompting to expound on her many talents: "I am intelligent at math..." "Naomy- you are intelligent at all the subjects!" "Ok... I love my mom. I am a good dancer. I am a good singer." "Good! Keep going." "um... I can fly." "hmmm how about you have a good imagination?" "Ok, I have a good imagination." .... "I am-- transparent!" "Uh, ok Naomy. You do not need my help with this assignment. Go write your poem!"

Rocio is infatuated with the June bugs that are invading the school (and my house). She started by picking them up and cradling them in her hands, calling them "My baby!" Then she turned her wooden box that she uses to hold tickets into a bed for the baby bugs... complete with a cloth wrapped inside as bedding. When I told her she could not keep the box on the floor by her desk, because she was constantly kneeling down on the floor to check on the status of her babies, she pleaded ok ok! and I made her set them outside in the hallway until recess. Later during a group assignment, I found out she and her girl friends were planning a baby shower for the baby bugs. "Baby shower" was a phrase that I was surprised to hear from my little hondureños in the first weeks of school, when I thought they knew so little English. I quickly found out how they knew the words.... that's what everyone hear calls it. Apparently there is no Honduran term for such a party, so they just use the English one. (So hah, Frenchies... the English speakers have a few internationally-adopted phrases floating around out there, too!) So all the girls in my morning class were gathered around Rocio's desk, cutting invitations out of her English notebook cover (there was some dog bone image repeated across the inside of the cover... dog bone shaped invitations for a June bug baby shower... good grief!) When I started in to scold them for using their writing time on such frivolous things, Hilary told me, "But Miss, we are gonna have refresco and pasteles and... we are going to let you participate, Miss Susong!" Oh well, if I get to come then by all means, plan away! ;-P

Need I say more to explain the comic oddities of my afternoon class? Picture this: Oscar wearing Keydy's hair bow. 2 days in a row. When Anne came in to pick up my tutoring students, she mentioned on her way out, "uh, did you notice that Oscar is wearing a hair bow?" I shrug with eyebrows raised, to say, "It's Oscar. I am beyond trying to understand that kid." On day two I asked, just to make sure Keydy was ok with the fact that Oscar was wearing her hair accessories. "But Miss, she--she lended it to me." And I am proud of the fact that some of my students are catching on to the subtle difference between "borrow" and "lend." (Some of them have yet to capture the difference between borrow and steal, however...jajaja) And then I looked over to see that both Maho and Leo were sporting gold and purple bling, carnivale beads no doubt leftover from the girls' Tabu performance at the Mother's Day celebration two weeks ago. "But what?" they ask as I give them the teacher glare, Maho's purple beads strapped across his forehead and dripping from each ear. "NO, Miss!" to indicate that no, the beads are not at all a distraction to their learning, as Maho yanks them off and starts whipping them around, narrowly missing Leo's head. Just a normal 2 minute peek into Cuarto A...

Andres, our next door neighbor who will turn 3 at the end of June, walked right in through the screen door at 7 AM on Saturday morning with a barrage of questions. Our conversation went something like this:
What are you doing? Cleaning the house.
Where is Ana? In the bathroom.
What is she doing? Cleaning her bathroom.
Why? Because it is Saturday, and that is time to clean the house.
(Repeat this conversation two more times.)
Why? There is a time for everything, Andres. Saturday is the time for cleaning.
(Change subject. Andres points to the colorful wall hanging above the dining table.)
Whose is that? It's mine. I bought it in Guatemala.
I like it. I like it too. It is very colorful.
It has a boy. And a girl. Yes, and a sun, and two birds, and flowers.
And where is Ana? (repeat the first conversation for the 4th time.)
Andres, can you say my name? Can you say "Keh-rrrrri?"
(A shrug of indifference.) Andres. You know the name "Keyli?" Can you say Keyli?
Key-li. Good! So can you say "Key-rrrrrri?"
Gringa! Yes Andres, I am a gringa. But that is not my name. Gringa is not a name. It is a type of person. A gringo is from the United States or from Europe. Ana and I are both gringas. But Ana's name is Ana and I am Carrie.
Yo soy gringo! Oh no, Andres. You are not a gringo! You are a catracho. A catrachito!
(Andres laughs like crazy. He thinks this is really funny.)
Quiero ser gringo. Oh, you do? Well, I will have to talk to the government about that. Government: Andres wants to be a gringo. Is this OK?
Then we played a short game of roll-the-gigantic-ream-of-duck-tape-across-the-floor (since our house is toy-less). Andres politely inquired (as is our running joke) whether I had eaten any cockroaches yet today. Of course, I replied. I eat cockroaches every day. I had a rico cockroach snack already this morning. Then the Aguazul guys came to deliver our water, and I tried to send Andres with the money to give to the guys, thinking he would enjoy the task. The visit ended abruptly with Andre's mom Tania running to intercept him as he ran out of our house trying to pocket 100 lempira and screaming as Tania pried it out of his chubby little hands. Lesson learned: don't give this boy money.

Reina, our sweet sweet next door neighbor (and Andre's grandmother) came over for dinner tonight. Anne made pizza and brownies (which Reina absolutely adores- brownies are not a Honduran speciality, and I don't think they even realize that you can buy brownie box mix at La Colonia for about 30 lempira... so we gringas continue to impress with our dessert recipes!) Reina made fantastic enchiladas. Honduran enchiladas are kind of like Mexican tostadas, except the corn tortillas are deep-fried, with shredded chicken, lettuce, homemade red salsa, and grated cheese on top. ¡Que rico!) She caught us up on all the neighbor changes we've had lately, and the confusing (yet not what you'd think) story of the little boy who says he has two moms, and the family that has 2 sets of twins and whose little boys are uncle and nephew to each other, even though they are only 2 years apart. The family dynamics here can be really confusing. Usually when people are related they end up just explaining they're "primos" (cousins) and leave it at that. Anne and I are really going to miss Reina. She says she will Skype with us so we can see Andres growing up. She is going to Madrid in August for the World Youth Day celebration. Reina kind of reminds me of Cristiane, my French maman. Yes, I will miss my little Honduran neighborhood.