San Agustín

Written August 28, 2010

Today was an amazing day. It’s hard to sleep in here because it gets light so early, so I laid in bed until about 7:30. I went downstairs and Osiris told me we were going to move a shelving unit into my room today from the storage room, one of the rooms that flooded on Thursday night. You have no idea how ecstatic I was. I have been living out of my suitcase since I packed up and left Texas over a month ago. There hasn’t been anywhere to put my clothes so I’ve been keeping everything in my suitcases. The unfortunate side affect to living out of a suitcase in rural Honduras is that everything inside gets covered in ants. The problem with this is those little buggers bite, and they have been living in my clothes. I look like I have some kind of strange skin disease because I am just covered in itchy ant bites. Now that I have finally been able to move my clothes into a shelving unit I’m hoping I won’t have any more problems with ants.

After this bit of great news I started organizing my room and apparently missed Osiris calling me downstairs to their apartment. She saw me on tv. Yes, I’m a Honduran television star. When we were in Gracias the first week we were here a news crew from Maya TV came to our hotel to do a story and filmed one of the other teachers and I sitting on a bench and asked us a couple of questions. Then, that same night the school took us to the hot springs in Gracias to relax. The news crew was there as well, so they interviewed Jake and I. I’m really glad I didn’t see the interview, because I’m sure it was terrible and hilarious, as it was entirely in Spanish.

Then at 9 we walked over to Mike and Jake’s house and went for a hike to one of the aldeas (teeny tiny towns) outside of La Unión. We decided to take a shorter and more scenic route there, which meant walking on footpaths instead of along the road. We had to cross a few river and hike through a ton of mud due to the massive amounts of rain we’ve been getting lately. I didn’t have hiking boots because mine are still wet from our flooded house on Thursday. Thankfully my tennis shoes didn’t come off in the mud and despite Mike almost getting kicked down the mountain by a mule someone had tied up near the path we made it to San Agustín.

The views along the way were absolutely breathtaking. As we hiked higher and higher into the mountains we could see nothing but green peaks. I really wish pictures could do it justice, but it’s just impossible. It was hot and sunny for the majority of the hike, but we could see storm clouds rolling up over the mountains across from us. It’s funny because here you can see the rain hours before it gets to you, as weather here moves really slowly.

San Agustín itself is tiny. We had walked through all of town in about 3 minutes. Mike said he guessed maybe 100-200 people lived there. It’s incredibly poor, but the people there were really nice. A few people from the micro financing group that Mike is a part of did a service trip to San Agustín a few months ago to build new stoves in the homes there that have a chimney so that all of the smoke from the fire that heats the stove doesn’t stay in the house. Apparently respiratory illnesses are a huge problem here. One of the women who had a stove built let us in to her house to see the stove and how well it worked. She was extremely appreciative, but incredibly poor. That level of poverty is not something you see often in the US.

It took us somewhere between and hour and an hour and a half to walk to San Agustín and about 3 minutes to walk through it. After our tour we headed up to the road to try and hitch a ride back to town to beat the rain. Luckily, one of the guys who is employed at our school was out working in the pastures near us and was just heading back to La Unión when we walked up. We hopped in the bed of the truck and headed back to town. Riding around in the bed of a truck is the preferred method of transportation here, so 7 of us driving around town in the back of a truck was nothing unusual.

After getting home, showering and dinking around a bit we met up with Jake and two of the other teachers for a game of volleyball. We were hopelessly terrible, which I think frustrated Jake. He coaches volleyball, among other things, at Vida Abundante (our school). After a really fun but muddy game and a quick walk home in the rain Bryony, Holle and I made grilled cheeses while Amelia went to the birthday party of a girl she knows here from when she was here last summer. Osiris and family were in El Naranjo for her mom’s birthday for the night, so it was kind of nice to cook and have the place to ourselves. We ended up watching Star Trek on my laptop and enjoying the quiet time without the kids.

All in all, today was a pretty awesome day.

Excitement

Written August 27, 2010

Life in La Unión is pretty quiet and some would probably even say boring. Although there’s not a whole lot going on here I would say life really isn’t boring. Maybe I’ve just come to appreciate the little excitement in life. These are things such as when my classroom is finally finished after the first 4 days of school are already done, when my British roommates find out they have gotten into university so we bake them a cake, even when the water isn’t thick and full of mud when I shower. I guess I’m just learning to slow down and appreciate the small things in life.

Other times truly dramatic things happen. On Thursday night Bryony and I were making tortillas outside of the house with the woman who cooks our food (yes, I know I’m spoiled) when a huge storm blew in. Now, this was a Texas sized storm, except in Texas you’re at sea level. Here, you are so high that you’re actually in the storm clouds. So, when there is thunder and lightning it is literally right there. The lightening is incredibly bright and the thunder deafening. So, as I tried to roll out and cook tortillas in this craziness a huge bolt of lightning struck really close to us. Bryony called it quits and went inside. It turns out the lightning struck the cell phone tower across the street.

You might think ok, bad storm, pretty exciting, story over. Right? Wrong. As we were finishing up the tortillas Osiris, the woman I live with, ran by yelling that their apartment was flooded. They live downstairs in an apartment they built next to the house and the four of us girls live in the house. However, they have two rooms for storage at the ground level of the house. So, after hearing this news, we quickly finished up the tortillas and ran downstairs to see at least a foot and a half of water in the downstairs storage rooms and a few inches leaking up into their apartment. While I was making tortillas thinking wow, it sucks making tortillas in the rain, the other girls, Albin and Osiris were out in the street trying to build a barrier to keep the water from pouring into their property and flooding everything more. When I came down we started frantically moving stuff out of the storage rooms and bailing water out the doors and windows with buckets and bowls as quickly as possible. It must have been quite a sight watching us frantically tossing water out of the rooms and running around moving all of the family’s belongings out.

After bailing out a ton of truly nasty, dirty flood water that we were all completely covered in as lighting flashed all around us and the skies opened up we called it quits for the night and sat down for a lovely dinner of tortillas, beans, rice and fried plantains. You know, the usual.

Despite how little goes on in La Unión there really never is a dull moment.

Initiation

Written August 22, 2010

Yesterday we got a call from the three gringos (Americans) that live here and they said they were throwing a birthday party for someone in the church and we were all invited. So we headed over there around 8, just in time to pray, sing happy birthday and get some dulce de leche cake (Lauren, don’t worry, yours is better ☺). There were about 15 or so people there who were all around 19 or 20 ish. One of the girls who will be in my 9th grade class was there so it was nice to sit and chat with her. I was pleasantly surprised by how good her English is. It’s weird though, because in the US it is entirely unacceptable to do basically anything with your students outside of a school sponsored function, so this was a new experience for me. It’s nice to be in a small town where I don’t have to worry about crazy parents out on a witch-hunt for teachers. Obviously I still have to keep a little distance, but I much prefer getting to know my students while keeping a boundary than never really being allowed to get that close to them.

Once everyone had eaten cake they said we were going to play a Honduran game to initiate us. We had no idea what to expect but the boys assured us it wasn’t anything bad. So, the four of us girls (me, Amelia, Bryony and Holle) were all put in a room with three other Honduran girls. None of us had any idea what was going on. They called out one of the Honduran girls first, and all we could here was a lot of clapping and some screaming. Obviously that was disconcerting but I figured it was a group of people from church, so how bad could it be? I got called out 3rd and was the first of the Americans to go. I was told to sit across from one of the Honduran guys and repeat what he said and mimic his motions. Ok, no big deal. He kept saying “pidipipow” and touching his head, crossing his arms, touching his legs or standing up and I just imitated him. Everyone was clapping like I was doing well and kept telling him to go faster. After some time I went to sit down and they had slipped a cold, wet rag onto the seat. I definitely was not expecting it, but after I got over the initial shock I was able to laugh about it. It was pretty funny to watch the same thing happen to the other girls too. There’s no better way to feel comfortable in front of a new group of people than to make a complete fool of yourself. We all got a good laugh out of it and even lined up to take a picture of our wet behinds.

Despite having a wet butt most of the night I had a lot of fun and enjoyed meeting people in town that are more my age that aren’t married with 3 kids. I saw a lot of them at church today and felt much more welcomed into the community. I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone a lot better over the next year.

La Finca

Written 8/19/10

All week we have been working on our classrooms and, since mine’s not finished yet so I can’t decorate it, I’ve been working on curriculum and planning for the 7 classes I will be teaching (the students go to 9 classes every day that are 40 minutes long each). It’s been very relaxing and I have been able to get to know some of the other teachers better because of it. The other teachers are absolutely fantastic and more than willing to help you with anything. They are clearly really passionate about the students and genuinely good people, so I’m very excited to work with them all year!

Today after school Amelia and I went with Jake and our principal up to their coffee farm (called a “finca” here). A married couple that teach at our school, Mr. Perdomo’s (our principal) family and Jake’s family all bought this farm a few months ago. It is up in the mountains above La Unión and is really beautiful. It’s over 20 acres of coffee plants. It has a system set up to take the coffee seed out and clean the beans and a house on the front part of the property. As you hike up the mountain there’s also a small stream, some plantain trees and tons of beautiful scenery. They need to clear some of the land a bit more and cut some of the coffee plants that have grown to high, but there is a good amount of coffee on the plants. The harvest is in November and December, so I’m planning on heading up there with them to learn how to harvest coffee, and if I’m feeling especially motivated maybe I will help them clear off some land too. I figure if I want to get the true Honduras experience I need to learn how to pick coffee while I’m here!

While we were up there a storm was coming in, so you could just see the sheets of rain slowly making their way towards us, and it was so quiet and the surrounding mountains were so beautiful. It was like something out of a movie. Despite the slippery conditions due to the amount of rain we’ve been getting it was nothing short of breathtaking. They have plans to build a solar powered coffee dryer, small pond to raise tilapia in, re-vamp the house to have a guard or family live in during harvest time, raise some cows there and have a horse or two to get around the farm. There’s tons of land so all of that is definitely possible.

The finca is only about 15 minutes outside of town, so once we drove back Mr. Perdomo invited us over for coffee. He owns another farm further outside of town where he grows coffee, various vegetables and bananas and raises chickens, cows, etc, so the coffee we drank was from his farm and it was honestly one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had. I’m still trying to get used to drinking black coffee, but this was so smooth that I wouldn’t have wanted milk or sugar in it. He gave us a bag of coffee to take home, so we’re looking forward to having that. He also invited us up to his finca one weekend to get out of the city, although I don’t necessarily need to escape to a place smaller and more remote than La Unión).

We also learned a lot about coffee today. Apparently the workers who pick the coffee usually make about 25 lempiras per basket, which is about the size of a gallon container. That is somewhere around $1.30 per basket, which means that the pickers actually make really good money by La Unión standards, but they only make that money for a short period of time. Market value for coffee is about $1.50 a pound right now, so your profit margin isn’t that big unless you’re selling a lot of coffee or selling it to the US or other countries. There’s also a countrywide coffee tasting competition here and any farm can join. The winners usually get great accounts with the US, Europe, Japan or other big coffee buying countries. Apparently they want to be a part of the competition in a few years once they get the hang of things. Also, in Honduras a lot of times people roast their coffee over a fire, so sometimes the fire is perfect and the coffee comes out fantastic and other times the fire is too hot, or not hot enough, or doesn’t roast the coffee evenly and it doesn’t come out right. This causes a lot of people to ship the coffee before it’s roasted. I guess the longer you store coffee before you roast it the better it actually is. Lastly, Hondurans grind up their coffee really fine, like flour, which is much different than the coarsely ground coffee in the US.

Long story short, I learned a lot about coffee today and got to see some breathtaking scenery. Life is good here in sleepy La Unión.

Getting situated

Written Tuesday, August 17, 2010

My life for the next year has finally begun! I am in La Unión in the department of Lempira. It is absolutely beautiful here! La Unión is a very small town up in the mountains. The town is so small that we don’t have paved roads, mail delivery or a post office. Despite the how small the town is I really haven’t found myself bored yet, hence the lack of blog posts.

I am living with a couple and their 3 children. Josselyn is in 3rd grade, Josue is 5 and Diane is about 6 months old. Needless to say it is generally pretty chaotic around here, but I’ve enjoyed it so far. Living with them has given me tons of opportunities to practice my Spanish and learn how to speak more like a “catracha” (Honduran). Their family is quite wealthy by Honduran standards and has actually moved out of their house and into an apartment they built beside the house. It’s small, but I guess it’s working alright for them. I am living in their 4 bedroom house with 3 other teachers from the bilingual school I’m working at, Vida Abundante. Life is good here! Our rent includes having people cook 3 meals a day for us and do our laundry. It’s better than home! As for my roommates, Amelia is from Michigan and Bryony and Holle are from England. Amelia and I each have our own rooms and Breony and Holle share a room. The 4^th room will be Bret’s room when he moves down here in October.

Bret is involved in the micro-financing group that started at the University of Michigan and is helping give loans to coffee farmers down here. There are 2 other guys living here that are involved in the group, Mike and Patrick, and Amelia knows them because she worked with them last summer here in La Unión and her boyfriend is working with them but he’s working back in the states right now. Mike and Patrick live with Jake, the guy who hired me to work at the school. He’s also from Michigan, but didn’t attend UofM for school. Basically it’s one giant Michigan party down here!

Monday we began working at Vida Abundante getting our classrooms together and figuring out our schedules. School actually starts on Monday the 23^rd with a parent meeting on Friday the 20^th, but, go figure, my classroom isn’t done being built yet. I am the homeroom teacher for 9^th grade, which is the oldest class they have right now. Therefore, they needed to build another classroom to accommodate another grade of students. You would think that this would have been taken care of during the ample summer vacation, but that’s just not the Honduran way. So, I’m unable to decorate my classroom this week, and probably won’t be able to do so until Sunday or quite possibly Monday after they finish painting the room. However, I’m just going with the flow and trying to figure out what I’m going to teach for the first week.

I am teaching English language classes and history to the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders and I will do devotionals every morning with my 9^th grade homeroom. I love the way classes are done here because you don’t have every class every day. The only class I have every day should be devotionals in homeroom. On Mondays I have homeroom from 7:20-7:40 and don’t have another class until after recess, at 10:40. Then on Fridays I am done with classes at 1:20 and school ends at 2:40. I have a pretty sweet schedule. It will probably change because that’s how things work here, but I really hope it stays as it is.

All of my classes will be taught in English. I have around twenty or so 7^th graders, nine 8^th graders and twenty-nine 9^th graders. The curriculum is pretty much laid out for us, so even though I’m teaching 7 classes I have plans I can follow that are already laid out. I plan on adding in some more fun activities, but at least I don’t have to kill myself planning for 7 different classes. It’s fun because I get to teach world history in 7^th grade, US history in 8^th and world geography in 9^th. I have a lot of variety in what I teach, which I think will end up being a good thing.

The power just went out, which is apparently a pretty common occurrence here, so I’ll wrap this up to conserve my battery. I will do my best to update more regularly. I miss everyone back home and hope all is well. Please update me on everything back home via email. The internet here is impossibly terrible, so even if I don’t respond to you right away I will definitely be reading emails. Thanks for all of your support!

I made it!

I'm finally in Honduras! After months of anticipation I'm here! We flew in on Sunday evening and got to our hotel in San Pedro around 2am. The next morning we got breakfast and went for a swim. We had to pick up some other teachers who were coming in later that day, so we headed to the airport, got them and then continued on to Gracias. We've been staying at an amazing hotel and just hanging out and eating great food. Basically, life has been pretty rough so far. I'm enjoying it while I can, because I know once I get to La Unión the party will be over.

All of the other teachers are great here! There are 6 of them who are currently moving into their homes here in Gracias. They are going to live at the base of the National Park, so I’m definitely going to come back here to visit them and hike the highest point in Honduras. 2 other teachers will be living here in the city.

Gracias is a pretty decent sized town, especially compared to La Unión. Everyone here is really friendly, and the hotel we’re staying at is absolutely beautiful. The views of the mountains are breathtaking. It’s amazing to just watch sheets of rain come over the mountains and slowly make their way towards you. I’m currently laying in a hammock looking out at some bamboo trees and the mountains. Once again, life has been pretty rough here.

We are starting our orientation at the school here in Gracias tomorrow morning, so I’m looking forward to that. So far the school has paid for everything. Since Sunday night all I’ve paid for is a phone. The school is near the national park and has an amazing layout. The classrooms are open but they have whiteboards, which is really nice. In Gracias they have a cafeteria, but I guess we don’t have one in La Unión. The school has a nice basketball court and soccer field, but supposedly the sports teams in La Unión are much better. I’m assuming its because there’s not a whole lot else to do there.

Tonight the school is taking us to the private hot springs in town for dinner and a swim before we start our actual training tomorrow. Obviously I have no complaints about anything so far. I have woken up these past few mornings with a smile on my face thinking “Yup, this is my life for the next year!” Honestly, I couldn’t be happier!