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.