May 16, 2010
It’s mid May now here (I say here because Jessie and I had a conversation about how it feels like life stops at home when we aren’t there. It stopped when we were in Europe and if we returned home now we would fully expect there to be knee deep snow) and our parents will be arriving to visit us at the end of the month. Excited for this we are. We are watching all six Star Wars with our boys now; about one a week. We gave new pillows to the boys who didn’t have one 2 weeks ago. That was great. I collected 9 that were left by old volunteers that were in good condition and washed them. We bought 7 new ones with money that was given to us to use for the boys by a visitor who came a while back and loved the boys. I sewed pillow cases out of sheets left by old volunteers at the sewing work shop and got to spend some quality time joking with the older girls with whom I don’t get to interact with a lot. Also, I got to practice my machine sewing skills thus adding to my repertoire of abilities that I’m learning here in pursuit of becoming what Barklie calls “A true Renaissance Man”
One funny thing is that Hondurans never mistake me for being Honduran, but I frequently get complimented on my ENGLISH by visitors. I’m always taken aback a bit and I usually reply “Dude, I’m from Virginia.”
The guy I work with, Lenny if you recall, wants to go to the US to make a lot of money and come back. One problem is that he speaks less English than I speak Japanese… or so he claims. Honduras has their own language to an extent because they use more English words than Mexico or parts of California and Florida and because they have a ton of made up Honduran words. So one day Lenny and I were starving all morning and we gorged ourselves at lunch to compensate. Afterward I said that I was satisfecho “satisfied” which is what they use most often in Spanish. Lenny then informed me that here in Honduras they say lleno “full” which comes from how they speak Spanish more like an English speaker would as if they were translating from English than speaking it like a person from Spain does. Then he said that they have a “Honduran” word for full also which he pronounced “fool”. I smiled and told him that he knows more English than he thinks, but he just doesn’t know that it’s English.
I have done a bunch of work for the woman who runs the internal clinic recently. She likes to use her meager English abilities in conversation with me, which I view as an attempt to condescend me by discounting my Spanish while elevating herself by flaunting her knowledge. I could be wrong though. She could very well be carrying the conversation with her 26 word vocabulary. I have been told by the volunteer nurses that she like to correct other Hondurans on the pronunciation of my name. This all made it funny for me when I arrived at the clinic and she had left a note detailing the problems she wanted fixed and spelled my name Strip. I have to say though that she would be winning if this were a “Hondurans spelling Trip’s name correctly” contest as Strip is far closer to being correct than Shuef.
The other day I heard Procol Harum’s song “Whiter Shade of Pale” (no I did not have to look up who the artist was, but I have a suspicion that I should look up the spelling) and Boys 2 Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You”, but the words were in Spanish. This is not surprising given how Jessie has told me that anytime the kids are asked to do anything that requires creativity such as draw a picture all they do is copy. The teachers complain that trying to get the kids to create something original is like trying to lead a cow down steps. We went to Copan and to Lake Yojoa and one thing we observed in both are that all of the Honduran owned businesses are run by the same model all the way down to having the exact same menu, and the only businesses that are thriving are the foreign owned ones which all bring something fresh to the table. I’m not an anthropologish or anything, but I suspect this might be cultural.
On Friday I went to Tegus to get my drivers license. I had to have a doctor’s note with a vision test and my blood type, a note from work, my passport, my residency card, passport size photos, a copy of my 3rd grade report card and I forget what else. I got there respectably dressed in Polo shirt and shorts and deck shoes like a UVA frat boy and with a tone of offended seriousness Officer Jerkface informed me that I had to be wearing long pants to get my drivers license to which I replied “Pucha, en serio!” (I’m not translating that. It means what it sounds like it means.) So I left feeling pissed off but looking dapper in search of the most offensive looking long clown pants, preferably with built in stilts, which I could find. I soon found a second hand store and asked for long pants. The girls working there told me that they only had girls’ pants and I told them that I was actually looking for girls pants. They liked that, but really I was thinking that Jessie needs new jeans anyway and I know that I can squeeze into hers so the formula is: Tight on me is right on her (if only it were that simple). Yet upon being pushed the girls actually brought a pair “their only pair” of guys’ jeans they had and they fit me pretty well. Not “The Fonz” well, but good enough for corrupt government work. Later the guy who took my photo asked me if I spoke Spanish and when I said yes he asked if I spoke Catracho which is slang for Honduran or a Honduran person. This goes back to what I said earlier about how different Honduran Spanish is from general Spanish.
The ranch is located very close to a military training base and until recently we have seldom heard gunshots come from there. Recently they have been shooting a good deal just after sunset which reminds me of home and our crazy neighbor. Our volunteer house is attached to a building of offices including the office of the 4 guys and 1 woman who makes up the religion department. They organize mass and all special holiday ceremonies. I don’t know if it is the ranch or Catholics in general, but every week is a religious holiday here and making a huge deal of each one is all that these five people do. They go nuts. And someone sells them fireworks. Did I mention that their home base is 30 feet from our window? Several times we have been wrenched from our slumber by deafening fireworks at 4 in the morning. And they call these days “holidays”. These aren’t fun colorful fireworks either. These are loud explosions that are designed for nothing more than solely to make sinners repent with haste. When the powers that were purchased this land for an orphanage they were aware the gunfire from the military training base and well concerned for the effects it may have on the children. Little did they anticipate the effects of the maniacal religion guys and their apocalyptic firework potential. It is sad how often we are awoken and Jessie asks “Is that the military or the religion department?” and I say “If it’s late it’s the military. If it’s early it’s worst.”
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Catracho
Catracho is slang for Honduran. Similar to how Gringo is slang for American.
4/6/2010
Written in Jessie’s journal on: 4/6/2010
Yesterday in hogar, one of our boys ran up to me with blood dripping from his fingers yelling in agony. The other boys were acting strangely, but nonetheless I ran to his aid. I knew something was amiss, but I started helping him anyway and I was asking him what happened when all the other boys busted out laughing. It was real blood, but it was from a nosebleed not a cut. They convinced him to use the opportunity to play a trick on me since they know how I’ll react. They like to pretend they are falling off of high places whenever they get the chance to get a rise out of me. They love to worry me. One thing that really worries me is dealing with blood here because so many of them have HIV. We have to be super careful about not ever coming in contact with it at all.
Yahtzee is the game of the month for April. We have been playing it every night. I had to translate all of the score cards, but they love it! We had a good vacation over semana santa, but it’s nice to be back. They were all so excited the first night we got back. I got hugs from all 23 of them, even those who don’t talk to me that much, and some of them had never hugged me before. That was really refreshing. Sort of a reminder of why we are really here.
The weekend before we left we went camping with all of the boys on the ranch including ours (the girls go separately). Their idea of camping is much different than ours though, but it makes sense because we would need a ton of tents if we did it the American way. We did have several big tents, but not enough so the rest slept in a local school while the tents got pitched on the playground. When I say “in” the school though that is relative because the schools here are open. It is the same where I work. I have a lovely breeze in my classroom, but when the air is still and the sun is hot the heat can be oppressive. We “camped” in a small pretty town by a river where we swam for hours. Once we were there the boys ran free in the town. As soon as we got there the only rule the boys were given was “Don’t steal people’s fruit from the trees”. Tempting it was, too. Orange, tamarindo, sugar cane, mangoes, papayas and other fruits grew all over the little town. The boys steal fruit off of ranch trees when it is still two weeks short of being ripe. Sure enough though, the boys began showing up at “camp” with four/foot sugar canes and their shirts filled with sour, sweet tamarindo. We began to reprimand them, but they pleaded with us, telling us that these things had been given to them “como regalo.” Sure enough, it seems that the small town had been quite captivated by our group of 150 or so orphaned boys. They were all very generous to them while we were there. The pulperias {little convenience stores} opened their doors and allowed them to hang out for hours. Many of the boys who had recently had birthdays had saved their birthday money {they are only given about 200 lempiras, which is about $10) so they could buy treats and snacks while in the town. They don’t get the opportunity to go out and choose what they eat very often, so it was exciting to see their excitement over this freedom. One of the joys of life that you really don’t think about, but it surely is a privilege.
One night, Trip and I were hanging out at a pulperia with 5 of our boys, talking to the owner and half-watching angels and demons in Spanish on TV. We bought them all popsicles and chocolate/covered frozen bananas. Of course, they were all in heaven. All in all, it was a nice trip, despite the discomforts. For example, for all 150 boys, tios and volunteers, we only had one toilet that only flushed from a reserve tank with a bucket. You had to fill the bucket and dump it in. You can imagine how disgusting it was by the end, and the reserve was empty. And of course, there was no showering. There were a monton of stinky boys, but we brought some bars of soap down to the river to lather up. This helped, although it still reeked. They don’t give they boys deodorant here, either, not even the older ones. We were thankful that Stefan gave us a ride home in his truck. We certainly weren’t looking forward to being stuck in a packed bus with them for two hours after all that.
We left early the next morning for Copan in northern Honduras. Por fin tenemos vacacion! We left at 7:30 am and did not arrive until almost 11 pm. The lack of major roads and the bumps and curves and mountains and some of it is not even paved makes what would be a 3hr trip in the US into an all day ordeal here. Oh, the joys of Honduras. Copan is beautiful, though a bit touristy. At this point in our time here though we are ready for some touristy lavishness. We ate pizza for the first time in 3 months! (What is referred to as pizza that is made on the ranch hardly counts, with the popular hard salty Honduran cheese.) Copan is the home to some of the most famous Mayan ruins. They are said to be the most artistic of the Mayan ruins with an abundance of intricately carved statues that have survived. We dedicated two full days to exploring the museum that houses the original pieces, the restored site of the ruins and the nearby residential area ruins.
We stayed with a nice family for the 5 nights that we were there, and they provided us with breakfast in the morning. They were nice clean accommodations with a hot shower and all. It cost us 300 lempiras ($15) a night for both. While we staying there in Copan Trip woke me up one night talking in his sleep. This isn’t really unusual, but this time he was speaking in clear Spanish. I usually can’t understand him when he’s talking in his sleep in English, but his Spanish was clear and correct, actually better than his waking Spanish. Analyze that. Late on the Thursday night before Good Friday many locals gathered in the center to make the beautiful sawdust alfombras (carpets) that cover the streets. They shut down the main street and cover it with 2in of regular sawdust. Then they decorate over that with a variety of colors of dyed sawdust to make intricate designs and images, mostly of Jesus, Honduras and the Virgin Mary. It was something I have long wanted to see from all of the descriptions I have read in my studies of Latin America and Mayan culture. The next night on Good Friday there was a religious procession that marched through the streets carrying large intricately decorated caskets with statues of Mary and Jesus on top. The procession carried on over the carpets destroying step by step their hours of hard work. Afterward the town kids swarmed the carpeted streets and had a sawdust war to be talked about till next year. Trip and I stood on the sidelines for a while laughing, talking and just taking in the madness. It is so interesting to see the influences of Mayan culture that have permeated through into the Catholic faith on one of their most important holidays. The journey home was much easier and enjoyable except that the traffic at the end made us miss the last bus back which forced us to stay in the city.
We were awoken by gunshots outside of our hotel (I would say window, but this dump didn’t afford us a window in our room), which we soon realized were meant to celebrate the beginning of Easter day. The potential aesthetic value of a firework as opposed to just being a loud bang is a concept lost on Hondurans. At religious celebrations on the ranch they set off fireworks in broad daylight just for the sound. Besides their fireworks have very little light emitted. On Father’s day, which is celebrated in March here and is a much bigger deal here than in the US, the religion department decided to set off fireworks at four in the morning outside of our window. I was scared shitless and asked Trip what he thought it was. “It was too loud to have been a gun. It must have been a transformer exploding.” he said. Then we heard their guitars start playing. I guess they aren’t completely irrational because if there is anything that brings people closer to God it has got to be thinking that your about to die. This was yet the beginning. From there they continued for over an hour until every child was crying, adult was angry, dog was barking and the nearby military base was locked and loaded. It was actually a blessing that we didn’t make it back to the ranch on Saturday night because everyone was awakened for a 4-7am mass which means the bombing started at 3am, and that is what is referred to as a ungodly hour. The orphanage was worried about being so close to a military base. Little did anyone consider that it was the military who should be worried. I imagine they refer to Semana Santa as “Hell Week” on the base.
After a week of vacation it was really good to get back to the ranch. Aside from our boys being excited I had a lot more energy to start an new quarter in school. A lot of my students did really well on their exams, so well, in fact, that I was able to retire 4 of them from tutoria entirely. Now I have taken on 4 new students who need it more. I kind of felt bad about retiring them after only one quarter, but that’s how it works here. I felt horrible telling them that they wouldn’t be continuing because they love turtoria, and when I walk the halls at the school I’m showered with students asking me when they get to come. Even from kids who aren’t in turtoria. It’s cute, but it’s getting old. I am pretty much maxed out with 12 students, because each kid gets at least 2hrs each week with me. There are also several kids who are new to the ranch and are way behind so I’ll be putting in extra hours to catch them up. One of my boys was particularly upset when I told him and he continually asks me why he can’t come. I have been working hard planning new activities to keep them focused and make learning fun for them in this next quarter. I also have to put together grades for all of my students and give them to their tios.
The other day I was going to talk to the 2nd grade teacher and my favorite student was in the classroom there. He is the one I wrote about in my last entry. When I got there, as soon as he saw me, he got so excited that he jumped out of his chair, ran out and slid down the hallway until he got to his shoes which he frantically began putting on. Until I had to break it to him that he didn’t have tutoria right now. He was crushed. I felt so bad, but it was the cutest thing. He did really well on his exams as well. The teacher told me that she has seen a real improvement in is work. It has been really gratifying to see some of the results of my work, but there are also some students who really didn’t do well at all. It is frustrating though, because I have already gone over the mistakes on the exam with some of them. They knew the answers, but they got them wrong. I think we need to go over some test-taking skills.
When I was doing study sessions by hogar with all of the kids, not just my students, before the exams. I was surprised by some of the kids. It seemed that there were a lot more that should be in tutoria with me, or maybe they just need better teachers. I had a lot of fun with these study sessions. I was worried about teaching so many kids together after school hours when they are a little rowdier. I was pleasantly surprised, though. A lot of them participated and seemed to enjoy it. Part of this is, I think, because of one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve made since I’ve been here. I bought a mini white board about the size of two standard sheets of paper side by side and a bunch of markers. The kids love writing on it, and it increases their desire to participate a great deal. At the study sessions, we passed the board around the circle so that everyone could get a chance to do an example problem from each theme on the exam. With the 9-12 year old boys hogar, we sat outside in the grass in a circle for the hour, and it was actually quite pleasant. That is, until one of the boys got up and went behind me up the hill about 5 feet. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the dull dribbling sound characteristic of when one pees in the grass. We all looked up and jumped up quickly to avoid the stream. We were forced to relocate the session. I don’t think the kid even thought about it. He just really had to pee and that was as far as he could get. Plus, I think he chose that particular spot because he wanted to pee on top of a particularly large anthill that was up there. We had a good laugh and moved on.
Hondurans have a uniquely interesting way of pointing at things. They don’t use their hands and fingers but they use their lips instead. They purse them out and point with them in the desired direction. I have even picked up the habit myself. It’s hard not to when you’re around things like that so much. They also do it while they’re talking. Anytime a Honduran is angry or a conversation gets more intense, they start talking in a deeper voice and stick out their lips when they talk. We would call it pouting, though it is usually only kids that pout. Here, everyone does it. I have gone through phases with what I think about this pouting and how I react to it. At first, it was kind of strange and it took time to get used to it. Then for a while I hardly noticed it anymore. Then about two weeks ago I was sitting at dinner in my hogar with about 7 boys and Tia Otilia. We were all just talking when suddenly the conversation got more heated and everyone had something to say. I looked up from my food, looked around me and noticed that there were 5 people talking at once, lips pursed, voices deepened and it hit me all at once. I nearly burst out laughing right there. I had to get up and leave so I could laugh. I don’t know why, but in that moment, it suddenly became hilarious. An endearing kind of hilarious. I’m still in that funny phase, but I’ll probably be doing it myself soon enough.¿
4/6/2010
Written in Jessie’s journal on: 4/6/2010
Yesterday in hogar, one of our boys ran up to me with blood dripping from his fingers yelling in agony. The other boys were acting strangely, but nonetheless I ran to his aid. I knew something was amiss, but I started helping him anyway and I was asking him what happened when all the other boys busted out laughing. It was real blood, but it was from a nosebleed not a cut. They convinced him to use the opportunity to play a trick on me since they know how I’ll react. They like to pretend they are falling off of high places whenever they get the chance to get a rise out of me. They love to worry me. One thing that really worries me is dealing with blood here because so many of them have HIV. We have to be super careful about not ever coming in contact with it at all.
Yahtzee is the game of the month for April. We have been playing it every night. I had to translate all of the score cards, but they love it! We had a good vacation over semana santa, but it’s nice to be back. They were all so excited the first night we got back. I got hugs from all 23 of them, even those who don’t talk to me that much, and some of them had never hugged me before. That was really refreshing. Sort of a reminder of why we are really here.
The weekend before we left we went camping with all of the boys on the ranch including ours (the girls go separately). Their idea of camping is much different than ours though, but it makes sense because we would need a ton of tents if we did it the American way. We did have several big tents, but not enough so the rest slept in a local school while the tents got pitched on the playground. When I say “in” the school though that is relative because the schools here are open. It is the same where I work. I have a lovely breeze in my classroom, but when the air is still and the sun is hot the heat can be oppressive. We “camped” in a small pretty town by a river where we swam for hours. Once we were there the boys ran free in the town. As soon as we got there the only rule the boys were given was “Don’t steal people’s fruit from the trees”. Tempting it was, too. Orange, tamarindo, sugar cane, mangoes, papayas and other fruits grew all over the little town. The boys steal fruit off of ranch trees when it is still two weeks short of being ripe. Sure enough though, the boys began showing up at “camp” with four/foot sugar canes and their shirts filled with sour, sweet tamarindo. We began to reprimand them, but they pleaded with us, telling us that these things had been given to them “como regalo.” Sure enough, it seems that the small town had been quite captivated by our group of 150 or so orphaned boys. They were all very generous to them while we were there. The pulperias {little convenience stores} opened their doors and allowed them to hang out for hours. Many of the boys who had recently had birthdays had saved their birthday money {they are only given about 200 lempiras, which is about $10) so they could buy treats and snacks while in the town. They don’t get the opportunity to go out and choose what they eat very often, so it was exciting to see their excitement over this freedom. One of the joys of life that you really don’t think about, but it surely is a privilege.
One night, Trip and I were hanging out at a pulperia with 5 of our boys, talking to the owner and half-watching angels and demons in Spanish on TV. We bought them all popsicles and chocolate/covered frozen bananas. Of course, they were all in heaven. All in all, it was a nice trip, despite the discomforts. For example, for all 150 boys, tios and volunteers, we only had one toilet that only flushed from a reserve tank with a bucket. You had to fill the bucket and dump it in. You can imagine how disgusting it was by the end, and the reserve was empty. And of course, there was no showering. There were a monton of stinky boys, but we brought some bars of soap down to the river to lather up. This helped, although it still reeked. They don’t give they boys deodorant here, either, not even the older ones. We were thankful that Stefan gave us a ride home in his truck. We certainly weren’t looking forward to being stuck in a packed bus with them for two hours after all that.
We left early the next morning for Copan in northern Honduras. Por fin tenemos vacacion! We left at 7:30 am and did not arrive until almost 11 pm. The lack of major roads and the bumps and curves and mountains and some of it is not even paved makes what would be a 3hr trip in the US into an all day ordeal here. Oh, the joys of Honduras. Copan is beautiful, though a bit touristy. At this point in our time here though we are ready for some touristy lavishness. We ate pizza for the first time in 3 months! (What is referred to as pizza that is made on the ranch hardly counts, with the popular hard salty Honduran cheese.) Copan is the home to some of the most famous Mayan ruins. They are said to be the most artistic of the Mayan ruins with an abundance of intricately carved statues that have survived. We dedicated two full days to exploring the museum that houses the original pieces, the restored site of the ruins and the nearby residential area ruins.
We stayed with a nice family for the 5 nights that we were there, and they provided us with breakfast in the morning. They were nice clean accommodations with a hot shower and all. It cost us 300 lempiras ($15) a night for both. While we staying there in Copan Trip woke me up one night talking in his sleep. This isn’t really unusual, but this time he was speaking in clear Spanish. I usually can’t understand him when he’s talking in his sleep in English, but his Spanish was clear and correct, actually better than his waking Spanish. Analyze that. Late on the Thursday night before Good Friday many locals gathered in the center to make the beautiful sawdust alfombras (carpets) that cover the streets. They shut down the main street and cover it with 2in of regular sawdust. Then they decorate over that with a variety of colors of dyed sawdust to make intricate designs and images, mostly of Jesus, Honduras and the Virgin Mary. It was something I have long wanted to see from all of the descriptions I have read in my studies of Latin America and Mayan culture. The next night on Good Friday there was a religious procession that marched through the streets carrying large intricately decorated caskets with statues of Mary and Jesus on top. The procession carried on over the carpets destroying step by step their hours of hard work. Afterward the town kids swarmed the carpeted streets and had a sawdust war to be talked about till next year. Trip and I stood on the sidelines for a while laughing, talking and just taking in the madness. It is so interesting to see the influences of Mayan culture that have permeated through into the Catholic faith on one of their most important holidays. The journey home was much easier and enjoyable except that the traffic at the end made us miss the last bus back which forced us to stay in the city.
We were awoken by gunshots outside of our hotel (I would say window, but this dump didn’t afford us a window in our room), which we soon realized were meant to celebrate the beginning of Easter day. The potential aesthetic value of a firework as opposed to just being a loud bang is a concept lost on Hondurans. At religious celebrations on the ranch they set off fireworks in broad daylight just for the sound. Besides their fireworks have very little light emitted. On Father’s day, which is celebrated in March here and is a much bigger deal here than in the US, the religion department decided to set off fireworks at four in the morning outside of our window. I was scared shitless and asked Trip what he thought it was. “It was too loud to have been a gun. It must have been a transformer exploding.” he said. Then we heard their guitars start playing. I guess they aren’t completely irrational because if there is anything that brings people closer to God it has got to be thinking that your about to die. This was yet the beginning. From there they continued for over an hour until every child was crying, adult was angry, dog was barking and the nearby military base was locked and loaded. It was actually a blessing that we didn’t make it back to the ranch on Saturday night because everyone was awakened for a 4-7am mass which means the bombing started at 3am, and that is what is referred to as a ungodly hour. The orphanage was worried about being so close to a military base. Little did anyone consider that it was the military who should be worried. I imagine they refer to Semana Santa as “Hell Week” on the base.
After a week of vacation it was really good to get back to the ranch. Aside from our boys being excited I had a lot more energy to start an new quarter in school. A lot of my students did really well on their exams, so well, in fact, that I was able to retire 4 of them from tutoria entirely. Now I have taken on 4 new students who need it more. I kind of felt bad about retiring them after only one quarter, but that’s how it works here. I felt horrible telling them that they wouldn’t be continuing because they love turtoria, and when I walk the halls at the school I’m showered with students asking me when they get to come. Even from kids who aren’t in turtoria. It’s cute, but it’s getting old. I am pretty much maxed out with 12 students, because each kid gets at least 2hrs each week with me. There are also several kids who are new to the ranch and are way behind so I’ll be putting in extra hours to catch them up. One of my boys was particularly upset when I told him and he continually asks me why he can’t come. I have been working hard planning new activities to keep them focused and make learning fun for them in this next quarter. I also have to put together grades for all of my students and give them to their tios.
The other day I was going to talk to the 2nd grade teacher and my favorite student was in the classroom there. He is the one I wrote about in my last entry. When I got there, as soon as he saw me, he got so excited that he jumped out of his chair, ran out and slid down the hallway until he got to his shoes which he frantically began putting on. Until I had to break it to him that he didn’t have tutoria right now. He was crushed. I felt so bad, but it was the cutest thing. He did really well on his exams as well. The teacher told me that she has seen a real improvement in is work. It has been really gratifying to see some of the results of my work, but there are also some students who really didn’t do well at all. It is frustrating though, because I have already gone over the mistakes on the exam with some of them. They knew the answers, but they got them wrong. I think we need to go over some test-taking skills.
When I was doing study sessions by hogar with all of the kids, not just my students, before the exams. I was surprised by some of the kids. It seemed that there were a lot more that should be in tutoria with me, or maybe they just need better teachers. I had a lot of fun with these study sessions. I was worried about teaching so many kids together after school hours when they are a little rowdier. I was pleasantly surprised, though. A lot of them participated and seemed to enjoy it. Part of this is, I think, because of one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve made since I’ve been here. I bought a mini white board about the size of two standard sheets of paper side by side and a bunch of markers. The kids love writing on it, and it increases their desire to participate a great deal. At the study sessions, we passed the board around the circle so that everyone could get a chance to do an example problem from each theme on the exam. With the 9-12 year old boys hogar, we sat outside in the grass in a circle for the hour, and it was actually quite pleasant. That is, until one of the boys got up and went behind me up the hill about 5 feet. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the dull dribbling sound characteristic of when one pees in the grass. We all looked up and jumped up quickly to avoid the stream. We were forced to relocate the session. I don’t think the kid even thought about it. He just really had to pee and that was as far as he could get. Plus, I think he chose that particular spot because he wanted to pee on top of a particularly large anthill that was up there. We had a good laugh and moved on.
Hondurans have a uniquely interesting way of pointing at things. They don’t use their hands and fingers but they use their lips instead. They purse them out and point with them in the desired direction. I have even picked up the habit myself. It’s hard not to when you’re around things like that so much. They also do it while they’re talking. Anytime a Honduran is angry or a conversation gets more intense, they start talking in a deeper voice and stick out their lips when they talk. We would call it pouting, though it is usually only kids that pout. Here, everyone does it. I have gone through phases with what I think about this pouting and how I react to it. At first, it was kind of strange and it took time to get used to it. Then for a while I hardly noticed it anymore. Then about two weeks ago I was sitting at dinner in my hogar with about 7 boys and Tia Otilia. We were all just talking when suddenly the conversation got more heated and everyone had something to say. I looked up from my food, looked around me and noticed that there were 5 people talking at once, lips pursed, voices deepened and it hit me all at once. I nearly burst out laughing right there. I had to get up and leave so I could laugh. I don’t know why, but in that moment, it suddenly became hilarious. An endearing kind of hilarious. I’m still in that funny phase, but I’ll probably be doing it myself soon enough.¿
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Puchabo!
Written in Trip’s notebook March 29, 2010
When we went camping with the boys
When we went camping with the boys
So now I’ve finished with all of my work at the houses in the city, and it feels so nice to be working back on the ranch. I had begun to feel like I was a stranger on the ranch after spending so much time away. The up side is that I know my way around the massive city better now than I ever imagined I would have. Also, I took the opportunity to bring back stuff for Jessie and I so we may avoid having to leave the ranch in the future unless we want to. I stocked up on cake mixes [for kid’s birthdays], cereal, granola, peanut butter, pasta, powdered milk and such—things I knew we would need but wouldn´t go bad. Now the other volunteers tease that we have our own bodega (warehouse). Coincidentally, all the guys I work with in maintenance have discovered that I keep some basic parts like outlet covers, toilet parts, lightbulbs and scraps of wood in our closet with my tools, and they tease me that I have my own maintenance bodega. I was starting to get really frustrated and unhappy working in the city because I was waking up at 515 and not getting back to the ranch until 730. I was always exhausted, never saw Jessie and was easily irritated by the other volunteers, the women at the houses in the city and even the kids in hogar.
One day when I was in the city, one of the volunteers who was taking the kids who have HIV to their interconsulta appointments (appointments with specialists in the city) decided to drop by and see me and say hi. When she found me, I was ripping up a toilet to replace it. I had a hammer and chisel and I was chipping away the concrete base that they use to set the toilets here. She saw me with sweat dripping from my nose and porcelain chips stuck to my face. I looked up when I heard her say, “Oh my god is this really what you do for 15 hours a day?”
Around the same time I finished in the city I also finished my list of things to do for the other volunteers and almost finished with the things for Jessie and I. I know that after my last blog, everyone was worried that I was pushing myself too hard and it would burn me out. Jessie has been worried, and to be honest, so have I. But my plan has been to knock everything out early so that I wouldn´t always have a daunting list and the rest of the year would be smooth sailing. People (and I won´t name names) said that this was impossible. They said that like a marathon runner, I had to set a pace to keep for the whole year and just keep running. Now we are on vacation in Copán for a week, and I have nothing pressing on my to do list. I have a list of big projects, but it is nothing that keeps me awake at night, and I´m also excited because Jessie and I have finally gotten our room painted and since then I´ve actually spent a couple days doing nothing but reading.
During my marathon of work, I managed to slip in a few personal projects, including one frivolous endeavor that I expect will warm the hearts of some of my in-laws. We have a rooftop patio in the volunteer house where Jessie is growing tomatoes, basil and cilantro and where the volunteers like to host our candlelit, group, potluck dinners. We have a very nice sharing our time under the Honduran night sky except for the streetlight we have just above our heads. To digress a little bit, the hardest part of any project for me is always the set up. I always have a list of projects and their necessary components in my head and written on my to do list. It sometimes takes me weeks to gather all the necessary parts and tools, because it is more efficient to wait until I come across than actually trying to go out looking for it—there´s no telling where I´ll find it. So after weeks of looking for spare wire, pipe and most of all a tall ladder, I finally put a light switch on the pole so that we can shut off the street light. Now I know some Segalla will reply to this with a comment about Peter Pan growing up or whatever, but the long and short of it is that if I had put out the light in the “old-fashioned” way, then someone would have called maintenance to fix it, and BAM. You get the point. So there are my critical thinking skills at work.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 5th, 2010:
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I had assumed that virtually all of the bus-riding I would do in my entire life would occur during those younger years when riding the bus was an adventure, and not such a pain in the ass. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I was wrong, and this occurred to me during one of my many bumpy bus rides to the city. (And when I say bumpy, I mean so bumpy that Hondurans have a special ride for bumpy—carrasposo. Also, we have seen bus drivers who´s seats have their own shock springs, causing them to bounce like a kid on a pogo stick the whole ride.)One day when Jessie and I were riding together, standing on the stairs because the bus was so full, we saw the guy who collects everyone´s money, get the registration and drivers license out of the glove box as we pulled up to one of the many road checks. As he arranged them for inspection, he slid a bill (that looked like a 50 lempira note, or $2.50) neatly in between the forms, after which Jessie and I exchanged a look, both having seen it happen. I have noticed this several times since, and we suspect they do it because they´re breaking some sort of law and are bribing the police to ignore it.
One of our favorite group activities among the volunteers is to discuss the peculiarities among the Honduran culture. I´m going to try to include some of these in our blog. First is my favorite, which is how people pick their noses openly in public. It is just how they roll here. Picking your nose in the middle of the conversation is normal, so when I get back, please don´t stare or make rude comments. Just respect my new culture and let me dig my treasure. Another is how women dress. Bear with me, because this might get offensive. In the US US
This is another thing I find interesting—the clothing rip-off industry. A lot of clothes are made in northern Hondurans due to lax trade restrictions (and free trade zones) in Honduras as compared to Asia . So we see a lot of Polo and other name-brand clothes here that are real and probably cheap because there are imperfections, but we also see rip-offs. For example: Quik Silver, American Falcon, and one time I saw a hat that said Polo Sport on the back with the seam going through the l and the o so I thought it said Pollo (Chicken) Sport and I started digging for my camera in excitement until I realized my mistake. Another thing they rip off is songs. I´ve heard several rip offs like Tony Braxton´s Unbreak My Heart and Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On, only with Spanish lyrics. They don´t translate them, they just pretty much use the music and make up new lyrics.
Another great little thing is how they point with their lips. In the US
The guy I work with, Nelson, is hilarious. When Jessie and I first got here, he took us on a tour of the ranch which surprised the other volunteers because they said he usually doesn´t hang around the other volunteers much. He is working in maintenance for his two years of service to earn his university. He has been living on the ranch for 7 years. On the second day I was working in maintenance, I was on my way home and I ran into Nelson working in a bathroom unclogging toilets. I jumped in to help him. I went into the bathroom and looked down into the hole where we had pulled up the toilet. He was jamming a half inch PVC pipe in from the outside to clear the pipe, and I was watching for when I could see the pipe come in. In Spanish class, you learn some words that sound like English words but mean different things. Some words, like funcionar, mean to function, but others like embarazada don´t mean embarrassed like you think they would. It actually means pregnant. Well, I knew that introducir meant to insert, but I didn´t know the word for pipe. So I just said introducir la pipa, which happens to mean smoking pipe, but is also slang for penis. So when I said that, he fell out, rolling on the ground laughing. Since then, we have accumulated a lot of stupid things that we say all the time that are always funny. Once, I fixed a light in the school for Reinhart´s wife, and when talking to her I used the word bulba instead of bulbo. Bulbo means lightbulb, bulba is slang for booby.
Once on a bus ride, a guy asked me to tell him what the lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas song Tonight´s Gonna Be a Good Night mean. They play this song constantly here. I started translating it simultaneously, and then I realized that a good part of the bus was intently focused on my interpretation. I bring my iPod and speakers up to the mountains when Nelson and I wash the sand for the water filters, and I´ll translate songs for him like November Rain and Hotel California.
I´ve taken to using the word pucha a lot, following suit with the rest here in Honduras
Then there is the word vos, which they say as “bo” and if asked to spell would write as “bo.” This is a word that I equate with “dude.” At first this word really kept me from understanding a lot, because it is stuck in the end of almost every sentence. The last word always sounded like a word I don´t know, when really it’s a word I do know plus vos on the end. One day this clicked with me, and people were like, “what happened? Yesterday you couldn´t understand anything and now we have to whisper to talk bad about you.” Then we have the the wonderful combination of these words, pucha and vos, that is said so much that I just heard it now while writing this very sentence. It basically means darn you. Two other words are “beh” and “bah.” The former is like a noise they make for disagreement or disapproval, and “bah” I short for “verdad” which means “right” or “true.” So regardless of your Spanish abilities, when you get here you can´t understand anything they say when they´re adding “beh,” “bah,” and “bo” to everything.
I know I don´t write about the boys in our hogar much, and I´ve thought about why that is. I think it is because I can´t find a middle ground between writing “we have 23 boys in our hogar who we both love” or writing ten pages about each one. We have one boy who they call Winnie pooh. (I´ll put up a picture later so you can see why. He looks just like a human Winnie the pooh would look.) Last week he sat down hard on a rickety bench we were all sitting on, and it almost collapsed. We all jumped up so as not to fall with it, and another boy said “Pucha Winnie Pooh Beh!” To which Jessie and I laughed to tears. We think they are hilarious when they sit around and grumble like old men saying things like “Nah beh,” with their lips pursed out like Keira Knightley. It is stories like these that I wish to tell, but I feel that I will fail to convey the desired sentiment.
When we got back from Copán, they were so excited. Most of them hugged us as soon as they saw us and wanted to talk right away about our trip. I think that our absence gave them a chance to reflect on how much they enjoy having us around.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 11, 2010:
We also have a great relationship with our tia Otilia. Yesterday, we worked with the hogar from 9-12 as we do every other Saturday morning. Jessie took some boys to the hortaliza (vegetable gardens) to build up the beds for the next planting. I took the other boys to clean up around the internal clinic. Both parties finished around 1030, so I asked Otilia if we could clean around the pool area as well. I spent Thursday and Friday cleaning the pool to open it for the season. We went and picked up scattered chunks of concrete and pepsi bottles, and afterwards we had a huge pool party. The theme was everyone drown Trip. Thus, my reward for cleaning the pool was getting to fight ten or fifteen boys for over an hour. I wish we had pictures of the little monkeys, but you can probably imagine three hanging on my shoulders and holding back my arms while the others took turns head-butting me in my stomach. They really enjoyed it though. A couple hours later before mass, one of the boys stopped me and started shaking my hand and asked me if I was the new pool coordinator. I said, “no, I just cleaned it up.” And with a huge smile on his face he said, “thank you, it´s beautiful.” Apparently this is the first time the pool has ever been cleaned and looking like an actual pool since it was opened in December 2008. They just used the pond water to fill it before, so it never looked like the kind of pools we are used to. Now, it does. And they love it.
Written in Trip’s notebook March 29, 2010
So now I’ve finished with all of my work at the houses in the city, and it feels so nice to be working back on the ranch. I had begun to feel like I was a stranger on the ranch after spending so much time away. The up side is that I know my way around the massive city better now than I ever imagined I would have. Also, I took the opportunity to bring back stuff for Jessie and I so we may avoid having to leave the ranch in the future unless we want to. I stocked up on cake mixes [for kid’s birthdays], cereal, granola, peanut butter, pasta, powdered milk and such—things I knew we would need but wouldn´t go bad. Now the other volunteers tease that we have our own bodega (warehouse). Coincidentally, all the guys I work with in maintenance have discovered that I keep some basic parts like outlet covers, toilet parts, lightbulbs and scraps of wood in our closet with my tools, and they tease me that I have my own maintenance bodega. I was starting to get really frustrated and unhappy working in the city because I was waking up at 515 and not getting back to the ranch until 730. I was always exhausted, never saw Jessie and was easily irritated by the other volunteers, the women at the houses in the city and even the kids in hogar.
One day when I was in the city, one of the volunteers who was taking the kids who have HIV to their interconsulta appointments (appointments with specialists in the city) decided to drop by and see me and say hi. When she found me, I was ripping up a toilet to replace it. I had a hammer and chisel and I was chipping away the concrete base that they use to set the toilets here. She saw me with sweat dripping from my nose and porcelain chips stuck to my face. I looked up when I heard her say, “Oh my god is this really what you do for 15 hours a day?”
Around the same time I finished in the city I also finished my list of things to do for the other volunteers and almost finished with the things for Jessie and I. I know that after my last blog, everyone was worried that I was pushing myself too hard and it would burn me out. Jessie has been worried, and to be honest, so have I. But my plan has been to knock everything out early so that I wouldn´t always have a daunting list and the rest of the year would be smooth sailing. People (and I won´t name names) said that this was impossible. They said that like a marathon runner, I had to set a pace to keep for the whole year and just keep running. Now we are on vacation in Copán for a week, and I have nothing pressing on my to do list. I have a list of big projects, but it is nothing that keeps me awake at night, and I´m also excited because Jessie and I have finally gotten our room painted and since then I´ve actually spent a couple days doing nothing but reading.
During my marathon of work, I managed to slip in a few personal projects, including one frivolous endeavor that I expect will warm the hearts of some of my in-laws. We have a rooftop patio in the volunteer house where Jessie is growing tomatoes, basil and cilantro and where the volunteers like to host our candlelit, group, potluck dinners. We have a very nice sharing our time under the Honduran night sky except for the streetlight we have just above our heads. To digress a little bit, the hardest part of any project for me is always the set up. I always have a list of projects and their necessary components in my head and written on my to do list. It sometimes takes me weeks to gather all the necessary parts and tools, because it is more efficient to wait until I come across than actually trying to go out looking for it—there´s no telling where I´ll find it. So after weeks of looking for spare wire, pipe and most of all a tall ladder, I finally put a light switch on the pole so that we can shut off the street light. Now I know some Segalla will reply to this with a comment about Peter Pan growing up or whatever, but the long and short of it is that if I had put out the light in the “old-fashioned” way, then someone would have called maintenance to fix it, and BAM. You get the point. So there are my critical thinking skills at work.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 5th, 2010:
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I had assumed that virtually all of the bus-riding I would do in my entire life would occur during those younger years when riding the bus was an adventure, and not such a pain in the ass. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I was wrong, and this occurred to me during one of my many bumpy bus rides to the city. (And when I say bumpy, I mean so bumpy that Hondurans have a special ride for bumpy—carrasposo. Also, we have seen bus drivers who´s seats have their own shock springs, causing them to bounce like a kid on a pogo stick the whole ride.)One day when Jessie and I were riding together, standing on the stairs because the bus was so full, we saw the guy who collects everyone´s money, get the registration and drivers license out of the glove box as we pulled up to one of the many road checks. As he arranged them for inspection, he slid a bill (that looked like a 50 lempira note, or $2.50) neatly in between the forms, after which Jessie and I exchanged a look, both having seen it happen. I have noticed this several times since, and we suspect they do it because they´re breaking some sort of law and are bribing the police to ignore it.
One of our favorite group activities among the volunteers is to discuss the peculiarities among the Honduran culture. I´m going to try to include some of these in our blog. First is my favorite, which is how people pick their noses openly in public. It is just how they roll here. Picking your nose in the middle of the conversation is normal, so when I get back, please don´t stare or make rude comments. Just respect my new culture and let me dig my treasure. Another is how women dress. Bear with me, because this might get offensive. In the US US
This is another thing I find interesting—the clothing rip-off industry. A lot of clothes are made in northern Hondurans due to lax trade restrictions (and free trade zones) in Honduras as compared to Asia . So we see a lot of Polo and other name-brand clothes here that are real and probably cheap because there are imperfections, but we also see rip-offs. For example: Quik Silver, American Falcon, and one time I saw a hat that said Polo Sport on the back with the seam going through the l and the o so I thought it said Pollo (Chicken) Sport and I started digging for my camera in excitement until I realized my mistake. Another thing they rip off is songs. I´ve heard several rip offs like Tony Braxton´s Unbreak My Heart and Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On, only with Spanish lyrics. They don´t translate them, they just pretty much use the music and make up new lyrics.
Another great little thing is how they point with their lips. In the US
The guy I work with, Nelson, is hilarious. When Jessie and I first got here, he took us on a tour of the ranch which surprised the other volunteers because they said he usually doesn´t hang around the other volunteers much. He is working in maintenance for his two years of service to earn his university. He has been living on the ranch for 7 years. On the second day I was working in maintenance, I was on my way home and I ran into Nelson working in a bathroom unclogging toilets. I jumped in to help him. I went into the bathroom and looked down into the hole where we had pulled up the toilet. He was jamming a half inch PVC pipe in from the outside to clear the pipe, and I was watching for when I could see the pipe come in. In Spanish class, you learn some words that sound like English words but mean different things. Some words, like funcionar, mean to function, but others like embarazada don´t mean embarrassed like you think they would. It actually means pregnant. Well, I knew that introducer meant to insert, but I didn´t know the word for pipe. So I just said introducer la pipa, which happens to mean smoking pipe, but is also slang for penis. So when I said that, he fell out, rolling on the ground laughing. Since then, we have accumulated a lot of stupid things that we say all the time that are always funny. Once, I fixed a light in the school for Reinhart´s wife, and when talking to her I used the word bulba instead of bulbo. Bulbo means lightbulb, bulba is slang for booby.
Once on a bus ride, a guy asked me to tell him what the lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas song Tonight´s Gonna Be a Good Night mean. They play this song constantly here. I started translating it simultaneously, and then I realized that a good part of the bus was intently focused on my interpretation. I bring my iPod and speakers up to the mountains when Nelson and I wash the sand for the water filters, and I´ll translate songs for him like November Rain and Hotel California.
I´ve taken to using the word pucha a lot, following suit with the rest here in Honduras
Then there is the word vos, which they say as “bo” and if asked to spell would write as “bo.” This is a word that I equate with “dude.” At first this word really kept me from understanding a lot, because it is stuck in the end of almost every sentence. The last word always sounded like a word I don´t know, when really it’s a word I do know plus vos on the end. One day this clicked with me, and people were like, “what happened? Yesterday you couldn´t understand anything and now we have to whisper to talk bad about you.” Then we have the the wonderful combination of these words, pucha and vos, that is said so much that I just heard it now while writing this very sentence. It basically means darn you. Two other words are “beh” and “bah.” The former is like a noise they make for disagreement or disapproval, and “bah” I short for “verdad” which means “right” or “true.” So regardless of your Spanish abilities, when you get here you can´t understand anything they say when they´re adding “beh,” “bah,” and “bo” to everything.
I know I don´t write about the boys in our hogar much, and I´ve thought about why that is. I think it is because I can´t find a middle ground between writing “we have 23 boys in our hogar who we both love” or writing ten pages about each one. We have one boy who they call Winnie pooh. (I´ll put up a picture later so you can see why. He looks just like a human Winnie the pooh would look.) Last week he sat down hard on a rickety bench we were all sitting on, and it almost collapsed. We all jumped up so as not to fall with it, and another boy said “Pucha Winnie Pooh Beh!” To which Jessie and I laughed to tears. We think they are hilarious when they sit around and grumble like old men saying things like “Nah beh,” with their lips pursed out like Keira Knightley. It is stories like these that I wish to tell, but I feel that I will fail to convey the desired sentiment.
When we got back from Copán, they were so excited. Most of them hugged us as soon as they saw us and wanted to talk right away about our trip. I think that our absence gave them a chance to reflect on how much they enjoy having us around.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 11, 2010:
We also have a great relationship with our tia Otilia. Yesterday, we worked with the hogar from 9-12 as we do every other Saturday morning. Jessie took some boys to the hortaliza (vegetable gardens) to build up the beds for the next planting. I took the other boys to clean up around the internal clinic. Both parties finished around 1030, so I asked Otilia if we could clean around the pool area as well. I spent Thursday and Friday cleaning the pool to open it for the season. We went and picked up scattered chunks of concrete and pepsi bottles, and afterwards we had a huge pool party. The theme was everyone drown Trip. Thus, my reward for cleaning the pool was getting to fight ten or fifteen boys for over an hour. I wish we had pictures of the little monkeys, but you can probably imagine three hanging on my shoulders and holding back my arms while the others took turns head-butting me in my stomach. They really enjoyed it though. A couple hours later before mass, one of the boys stopped me and started shaking my hand and asked me if I was the new pool coordinator. I said, “no, I just cleaned it up.” And with a huge smile on his face he said, “thank you, it´s beautiful.” Apparently this is the first time the pool has ever been cleaned and looking like an actual pool since it was opened in December 2008. They just used the pond water to fill it before, so it never looked like the kind of pools we are used to. Now, it does. And they love it.
Written in Trip’s notebook March 29, 2010
So now I’ve finished with all of my work at the houses in the city, and it feels so nice to be working back on the ranch. I had begun to feel like I was a stranger on the ranch after spending so much time away. The up side is that I know my way around the massive city better now than I ever imagined I would have. Also, I took the opportunity to bring back stuff for Jessie and I so we may avoid having to leave the ranch in the future unless we want to. I stocked up on cake mixes [for kid’s birthdays], cereal, granola, peanut butter, pasta, powdered milk and such—things I knew we would need but wouldn´t go bad. Now the other volunteers tease that we have our own bodega (warehouse). Coincidentally, all the guys I work with in maintenance have discovered that I keep some basic parts like outlet covers, toilet parts, lightbulbs and scraps of wood in our closet with my tools, and they tease me that I have my own maintenance bodega. I was starting to get really frustrated and unhappy working in the city because I was waking up at 515 and not getting back to the ranch until 730. I was always exhausted, never saw Jessie and was easily irritated by the other volunteers, the women at the houses in the city and even the kids in hogar.
One day when I was in the city, one of the volunteers who was taking the kids who have HIV to their interconsulta appointments (appointments with specialists in the city) decided to drop by and see me and say hi. When she found me, I was ripping up a toilet to replace it. I had a hammer and chisel and I was chipping away the concrete base that they use to set the toilets here. She saw me with sweat dripping from my nose and porcelain chips stuck to my face. I looked up when I heard her say, “Oh my god is this really what you do for 15 hours a day?”
Around the same time I finished in the city I also finished my list of things to do for the other volunteers and almost finished with the things for Jessie and I. I know that after my last blog, everyone was worried that I was pushing myself too hard and it would burn me out. Jessie has been worried, and to be honest, so have I. But my plan has been to knock everything out early so that I wouldn´t always have a daunting list and the rest of the year would be smooth sailing. People (and I won´t name names) said that this was impossible. They said that like a marathon runner, I had to set a pace to keep for the whole year and just keep running. Now we are on vacation in Copán for a week, and I have nothing pressing on my to do list. I have a list of big projects, but it is nothing that keeps me awake at night, and I´m also excited because Jessie and I have finally gotten our room painted and since then I´ve actually spent a couple days doing nothing but reading.
During my marathon of work, I managed to slip in a few personal projects, including one frivolous endeavor that I expect will warm the hearts of some of my in-laws. We have a rooftop patio in the volunteer house where Jessie is growing tomatoes, basil and cilantro and where the volunteers like to host our candlelit, group, potluck dinners. We have a very nice sharing our time under the Honduran night sky except for the streetlight we have just above our heads. To digress a little bit, the hardest part of any project for me is always the set up. I always have a list of projects and their necessary components in my head and written on my to do list. It sometimes takes me weeks to gather all the necessary parts and tools, because it is more efficient to wait until I come across than actually trying to go out looking for it—there´s no telling where I´ll find it. So after weeks of looking for spare wire, pipe and most of all a tall ladder, I finally put a light switch on the pole so that we can shut off the street light. Now I know some Segalla will reply to this with a comment about Peter Pan growing up or whatever, but the long and short of it is that if I had put out the light in the “old-fashioned” way, then someone would have called maintenance to fix it, and BAM. You get the point. So there are my critical thinking skills at work.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 5th, 2010:
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I had assumed that virtually all of the bus-riding I would do in my entire life would occur during those younger years when riding the bus was an adventure, and not such a pain in the ass. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I was wrong, and this occurred to me during one of my many bumpy bus rides to the city. (And when I say bumpy, I mean so bumpy that Hondurans have a special ride for bumpy—carrasposo. Also, we have seen bus drivers who´s seats have their own shock springs, causing them to bounce like a kid on a pogo stick the whole ride.)One day when Jessie and I were riding together, standing on the stairs because the bus was so full, we saw the guy who collects everyone´s money, get the registration and drivers license out of the glove box as we pulled up to one of the many road checks. As he arranged them for inspection, he slid a bill (that looked like a 50 lempira note, or $2.50) neatly in between the forms, after which Jessie and I exchanged a look, both having seen it happen. I have noticed this several times since, and we suspect they do it because they´re breaking some sort of law and are bribing the police to ignore it.
One of our favorite group activities among the volunteers is to discuss the peculiarities among the Honduran culture. I´m going to try to include some of these in our blog. First is my favorite, which is how people pick their noses openly in public. It is just how they roll here. Picking your nose in the middle of the conversation is normal, so when I get back, please don´t stare or make rude comments. Just respect my new culture and let me dig my treasure. Another is how women dress. Bear with me, because this might get offensive. In the US US
This is another thing I find interesting—the clothing rip-off industry. A lot of clothes are made in northern Hondurans due to lax trade restrictions (and free trade zones) in Honduras as compared to Asia . So we see a lot of Polo and other name-brand clothes here that are real and probably cheap because there are imperfections, but we also see rip-offs. For example: Quik Silver, American Falcon, and one time I saw a hat that said Polo Sport on the back with the seam going through the l and the o so I thought it said Pollo (Chicken) Sport and I started digging for my camera in excitement until I realized my mistake. Another thing they rip off is songs. I´ve heard several rip offs like Tony Braxton´s Unbreak My Heart and Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On, only with Spanish lyrics. They don´t translate them, they just pretty much use the music and make up new lyrics.
Another great little thing is how they point with their lips. In the US
The guy I work with, Nelson, is hilarious. When Jessie and I first got here, he took us on a tour of the ranch which surprised the other volunteers because they said he usually doesn´t hang around the other volunteers much. He is working in maintenance for his two years of service to earn his university. He has been living on the ranch for 7 years. On the second day I was working in maintenance, I was on my way home and I ran into Nelson working in a bathroom unclogging toilets. I jumped in to help him. I went into the bathroom and looked down into the hole where we had pulled up the toilet. He was jamming a half inch PVC pipe in from the outside to clear the pipe, and I was watching for when I could see the pipe come in. In Spanish class, you learn some words that sound like English words but mean different things. Some words, like funcionar, mean to function, but others like embarazada don´t mean embarrassed like you think they would. It actually means pregnant. Well, I knew that introducer meant to insert, but I didn´t know the word for pipe. So I just said introducer la pipa, which happens to mean smoking pipe, but is also slang for penis. So when I said that, he fell out, rolling on the ground laughing. Since then, we have accumulated a lot of stupid things that we say all the time that are always funny. Once, I fixed a light in the school for Reinhart´s wife, and when talking to her I used the word bulba instead of bulbo. Bulbo means lightbulb, bulba is slang for booby.
Once on a bus ride, a guy asked me to tell him what the lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas song Tonight´s Gonna Be a Good Night mean. They play this song constantly here. I started translating it simultaneously, and then I realized that a good part of the bus was intently focused on my interpretation. I bring my iPod and speakers up to the mountains when Nelson and I wash the sand for the water filters, and I´ll translate songs for him like November Rain and Hotel California.
I´ve taken to using the word pucha a lot, following suit with the rest here in Honduras
Then there is the word vos, which they say as “bo” and if asked to spell would write as “bo.” This is a word that I equate with “dude.” At first this word really kept me from understanding a lot, because it is stuck in the end of almost every sentence. The last word always sounded like a word I don´t know, when really it’s a word I do know plus vos on the end. One day this clicked with me, and people were like, “what happened? Yesterday you couldn´t understand anything and now we have to whisper to talk bad about you.” Then we have the the wonderful combination of these words, pucha and vos, that is said so much that I just heard it now while writing this very sentence. It basically means darn you. Two other words are “beh” and “bah.” The former is like a noise they make for disagreement or disapproval, and “bah” I short for “verdad” which means “right” or “true.” So regardless of your Spanish abilities, when you get here you can´t understand anything they say when they´re adding “beh,” “bah,” and “bo” to everything.
I know I don´t write about the boys in our hogar much, and I´ve thought about why that is. I think it is because I can´t find a middle ground between writing “we have 23 boys in our hogar who we both love” or writing ten pages about each one. We have one boy who they call Winnie pooh. (I´ll put up a picture later so you can see why. He looks just like a human Winnie the pooh would look.) Last week he sat down hard on a rickety bench we were all sitting on, and it almost collapsed. We all jumped up so as not to fall with it, and another boy said “Pucha Winnie Pooh Beh!” To which Jessie and I laughed to tears. We think they are hilarious when they sit around and grumble like old men saying things like “Nah beh,” with their lips pursed out like Keira Knightley. It is stories like these that I wish to tell, but I feel that I will fail to convey the desired sentiment.
When we got back from Copán, they were so excited. Most of them hugged us as soon as they saw us and wanted to talk right away about our trip. I think that our absence gave them a chance to reflect on how much they enjoy having us around.
Written in Trip´s notebook April 11, 2010:
We also have a great relationship with our tia Otilia.
Yesterday, we worked with the hogar from 9-12 as we do every other Saturday morning. Jessie took some boys to the hortaliza (vegetable gardens) to build up the beds for the next planting. I took the other boys to clean up around the internal clinic. Both parties finished around 1030, so I asked Otilia if we could clean around the pool area as well. I spent Thursday and Friday cleaning the pool to open it for the season. We went and picked up scattered chunks of concrete and pepsi bottles, and afterwards we had a huge pool party. The theme was everyone drown Trip. Thus, my reward for cleaning the pool was getting to fight ten or fifteen boys for over an hour. I wish we had pictures of the little monkeys, but you can probably imagine three hanging on my shoulders and holding back my arms while the others took turns head-butting me in my stomach. They really enjoyed it though. A couple hours later before mass, one of the boys stopped me and started shaking my hand and asked me if I was the new pool coordinator. I said, “no, I just cleaned it up.” And with a huge smile on his face he said, “thank you, it´s beautiful.” Apparently this is the first time the pool has ever been cleaned and looking like an actual pool since it was opened in December 2008. They just used the pond water to fill it before, so it never looked like the kind of pools we are used to. Now, it does. And they love it.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Case of the Needle-Swallowers
The Case of the Needle Swallowers
How is it that 2 girls have “accidentally” swallowed needles in the same week? One of them even swallowed two within three days of one another. They are both troublemakers already, and the general consensus is that it was no accident. They are okay, but they were hospitalized, and one had to have it surgically removed. I guess they thought it was a clever way to get to go to the city for a few days…
Written in my (Jessie´s) notebook on February 17, 2010:
This seems so backwards. The girls here, well a lot of them, are little terrors. They terrorize everyone around them. They are off the walls in class. It is really strange, the extent of this problem. The boys seem much more orderly in class, generally doing what they´re asked with a few exceptions, of course. The girls, however, are running around talking, hitting the boys and laughing at the people who read more slowly. I just saw one girl get up and knock another boy right out of his chair. He had his hands tucked in his shirt because it is unusually cold in Honduras right now. He just rolled onto the floor. The teacher only says their name loudly…they don´t pay her any mind. One of the volunteers that came with our group is a social worker here, and she works with the girls in particular. She too, is appalled by their behavior, the rudeness and the straight malice of a lot of the girls here. Yes, they have had really rough pasts, and that may be why they act out in the ways that they do, but, she says, there are girls in Germany (where she´s from) that have really rough pasts too. She has worked with many. It is cultural? Is it the way they´re treated here on the ranch? The boys here have tenfold the amount of privileges that the girls do. Does this bother them or are they just used to being inferior? Perhaps they understand why they don´t have these privileges. Perhaps it is because they´re so badly behaved.
Unfortunately, but also very fortunately, I am not working with the girls much at all, except for the few that I have with me in tutoria, so I won´t be able to get as close to this issue as I would like to be able to understand their behavior a little better. They walk all over the female teachers here, too. There is only one male teacher, and I have heard that he has really good class control. I have a strong feeling that this is because they respect the men here more, in general. Men aren´t allowed to be tíos for the girls, but women are allowed to be tías for the boys. Maybe the girls would be more orderly if they had more of a male presence in their lives that they respected. This seems like something they are truly lacking in their upbringing, whereas the boys have both a tío and a tía as their guardians and parents. I am observing a class with fourth grade girls in it right now, and their behavior is just atrocious. A girl is now walking around and banging on every boy´s desk and hitting them. They pay her no mind. The boys are participating in the lesson and raising their hands so they can go solve problems on the board.
Written in Jessie´s notebook 3/3/2010 (so far behind!!)
My job is going really well right now, all things considered. I was really dreading going to work on Monday morning, and then once I got there and started the day I realized how much I actually enjoy this job. Here are some photos of me in my classroom that I worked so hard to decorate!
The kids are not easy, and each of my 12 students has such distinct needs that it takes a lot of planning for each session. I have so many kids, though, that the planning time I do have usually isn´t sufficient. I have some really bad kids that I have to deal with. Here are some of the various situations that I have had to get through:
Two of my students from the fourth grade are friends and wanted to come to tutoria together. I agreed, on the stipulation that they would be separated if they didn´t behave well or do their work. They are learning about 6 digit numbers right now, adding, subtracting, greater than lesser than etc., so we played a dice game together that incorporated all of these processes. One of the boys lost, as is typical to any game, and he pitched a freakin fit. He yelled at me, saying he hated me and never wanted to come back, and then he ran to the door to try to get out and became even more infuriated when he realized that the door was locked and he needed a key to open it. I always lock my door from the inside for this very reason, as I learned early on. I can´t have my kids barging out of the room whenever they damn well feel like it. They´re my responsibility during this time, and I do not want to have to chase a hysterical kid all over the ranch like I probably would have had to in this situation. I also lock it to protect myself. Kids like to walk around and open doors and raid rooms while you´re working. I need it constantly locked from the inside and out. Anyway, this kid was infuriated and started kicking my fragile door. At least I was able to say some things to him before I escorted him back to his class. He wouldn´t talk or look at me for a week afterwards. I had Stephanie, the volunteer in his hogar, to talk to him about it. The next time I took him from class he was amiable and we had a really good session. I didn´t bring it up because it would only have made things worse. I had his tíos and volunteers to talk to him about it which was sufficient. He loses, though, because we have to keep competition out of tutoria. No fun games for him. His tíos said he is always like that. He is a seriously sore loser. Needless to say, they now come separately. He still loses his temper with me quite a bit, over really tiny things. Last session I had with him, he was so angry with him for making him do a subtraction problem where he had to carry the one. He was SO hotheaded that I kept thinking to myself… “Shit I can´t believe I just sharpened his pencil…” I just need to be careful with him.
One of my girls is a very hard worker, and she is just precious. She is dyslexic, though, so it takes a while to get work done, and it is quite a challenge for me. I have been doing a lot of research to find different exercises I can do with her and one of my other boys that is also dyslexic. One day, we were doing a worksheet together, and she was working really hard. All of a sudden she stopped and stared into space, stopped talking and started crying. She did so for the next 15 minutes until class was over. I did all I could to console her. I told her she could talk to me about anything—whether it be a problem in class, hogar, life, with me…though it didn´t help that day, she seems to have really warmed up to me more. She gets really excited when I come pick her up from class. I later learned that her mother lives here on the ranch in Casa Pasionista—our HIV/AIDS home, and she is in her advanced stages, slowly dying. This type of thing has happened a few times with her. Since I know she knows that she can talk about it if she wants to, instead of pushing her to work or sending her back to class, I´ve found that it is better to just pick out a book and read to her. She really enjoys it, and it is a good distraction.
Another situation I have with one of my kids is that she just refuses to work. She hasn´t said one thing to me from the time we met except: “I don´t want to do this. I won´t do it.” Even when I pick her up from class I say “Hey Sarah*, how are you? How´s school going?” and she just completely ignores me. I still wave to her and say hello and act like she isn´t acting that way…She won´t budge. The other day she threw her paper on the ground and said she refused to do anything. I put my pen down and said, “OK, we don´t have to work, we can talk about what is bothering you, whether it be an issue in your hogar, with me, with school or your friends…or you can leave. She, of course, didn´t want to talk, so she got up and left, stormed out, until she too reached my locked door and kicked it. My poor door won´t make it through the year, I´m sure. I´ve spoken about this situation with her teachers and tías, who are not surprised by this behavior. We will have a meeting soon to discuss the next step that we should take.
I have another student who apparently is a little hellion in class, always causing a ruckus, but he was absolutely wonderful with me. We always had a great time in tutoria together, and he was really progressing and taking in the lessons I taught him. Then he was so bad in English class one day that the teacher (a fellow volunteer) reported him to his tía, and he got in big trouble. Ever since then, he has hated all the volunteers/teachers and will not come back to tutoria. I think I´ll just give him some time and then try it again. *Update as of 3/20* I finally broke him down! I went to his class to pull him out enough times and he refused enough times and I continued to be nice to him and finally broke him down. We had a great session on Thursday, and I´m sure he will continue to come back. He even came to the optional exam study session that I provided for the whole fourth grade class!
It sometimes feels like I only write about the bad. It´s just what occupies me, challenges me, and makes me have to work harder and be more sensitive to all of the stories I am interfering in. But there is so much good here, too. My absolute favorite student, Mayron*, is my little sunshine here. He is 7 years old and in the 2nd grade. He has some sort of disease—not sure of the name—where he has little non-cancerous tumors growing in various places throughout his body. He has one growing behind his ear which is causing him to lose his hearing. He also has a slight facial deformity—one eye is higher than the other—due to a tumor, and it has caused him to have bad eyesight. He hasn´t had glasses for months though, because he broke them. He is so particular about his appearance. One of the first things I saw about him was so endearing. And he hated those glasses. He always walks around with his shirt tucked in perfectly and always adjusting it. When he goes to mass, he wears a tie and he is always straightening it out. The other day they gave him new uniform pants, and he was so proud of them. He kept looking down at them while we walked to tutoria. Before he would leave my aula, though, I had to roll up his pants (which are about a foot too long) so that the plaid squares matched up perfectly, color and all. This has now become a regular routine. He is just a tiny little guy, but he carries himself in such a mature way. This is him: I need to get a better picture.
He works SO hard in tutoria. He loves learning, and he tries so hard. When he writes, he sticks his tongue out. The other day while we were walking to the classroom he asked if I could give him homework today, which I´m not supposed to do. He begged me though, so while he was working I made him a worksheet with addition and word problems. He carried it so proudly back to his classroom and slipped it neatly into his backpack. When we play games, he always makes me choose a different country to represent each time. He is always Honduras. He always draws flags for each team. Once he drew a cross between a Honduras flag and an American flag and gave it to me, with both our names on the back. I just got back from walking him to the church for bible study, because his hogar left him behind and he didn´t want to walk alone in the dark. I just love him! I wish I could say his real name here because I even love that! The funny part about it is that his sister is the one who gives me the most trouble in tutoria. She is the one that refuses to work and won´t come back. They are so different, yet they do have matching freckles.
I love the boys in my hogar more than ever. After a frustrating day with the kids at work, I can always look forward to eating, hanging out, playing games and doing homework with them at night. I am writing this in my notebook while they sit around me, doing their work as well. We have a variety of games at the volunteer house (including yahtzee and Spanish scrabble, my favorites!), and I bring different games every night. It´s nice playing games with them, because they love it and Trip hates playing board games and will never play with me! He says they are called “bored” games for a reason. It´s good though, because we both bring different things to the table--different ways of entertaining them. They seem to love us both for different reasons! We are going camping with them for three days on their Semana Santa (spring break), and I´m so psyched! Trip and I are hoping to go to Copán for the rest of the week and staying with a family there that we have a connection with since we can take off work.
One of the boys playing battleship:
All in all, I´m really enjoying my time here. So much so that I really hate going on the internet. First of all, I´m just so tired, and there are so many other things that I´d rather do than walk up to the internet and become absorbed in another world so far away from where I am. Maybe this will pass when I become more homesick later, but for now I don´t feel this yet. We´ve been here for 9 weeks so far, and it feels like two. We´ve pretty much fallen into our rhythm here, which was difficult to do, I think, because to do so we´ve had to interfere in the lives that have been going on here for so long and create our own place here. It took time, but it has been rewarding.
Quick update 3/21/2010
This week has been exhausting! Final exams are next week and unfortunately I had the great idea of offering an optional study session in Spanish and math for the 2-4 grades in their hogares. That means 6 separate sessions (because the boys and girls are separated). Ahh!! I did the math sessions on Thursday, and it was tough, very long hours, but it seems like at least a few of them made some good progress. The Spanish one is tomorrow. Like I really have time to do more planning! The tíos really appreciated the effort though, so I think it was a good thing to do overall. They decided to make it obligatory for their kids, which just meant more mayhem for me to deal with. It was fun, but I will be glad when they´re over!
How is it that 2 girls have “accidentally” swallowed needles in the same week? One of them even swallowed two within three days of one another. They are both troublemakers already, and the general consensus is that it was no accident. They are okay, but they were hospitalized, and one had to have it surgically removed. I guess they thought it was a clever way to get to go to the city for a few days…
Written in my (Jessie´s) notebook on February 17, 2010:
This seems so backwards. The girls here, well a lot of them, are little terrors. They terrorize everyone around them. They are off the walls in class. It is really strange, the extent of this problem. The boys seem much more orderly in class, generally doing what they´re asked with a few exceptions, of course. The girls, however, are running around talking, hitting the boys and laughing at the people who read more slowly. I just saw one girl get up and knock another boy right out of his chair. He had his hands tucked in his shirt because it is unusually cold in Honduras right now. He just rolled onto the floor. The teacher only says their name loudly…they don´t pay her any mind. One of the volunteers that came with our group is a social worker here, and she works with the girls in particular. She too, is appalled by their behavior, the rudeness and the straight malice of a lot of the girls here. Yes, they have had really rough pasts, and that may be why they act out in the ways that they do, but, she says, there are girls in Germany (where she´s from) that have really rough pasts too. She has worked with many. It is cultural? Is it the way they´re treated here on the ranch? The boys here have tenfold the amount of privileges that the girls do. Does this bother them or are they just used to being inferior? Perhaps they understand why they don´t have these privileges. Perhaps it is because they´re so badly behaved.
Unfortunately, but also very fortunately, I am not working with the girls much at all, except for the few that I have with me in tutoria, so I won´t be able to get as close to this issue as I would like to be able to understand their behavior a little better. They walk all over the female teachers here, too. There is only one male teacher, and I have heard that he has really good class control. I have a strong feeling that this is because they respect the men here more, in general. Men aren´t allowed to be tíos for the girls, but women are allowed to be tías for the boys. Maybe the girls would be more orderly if they had more of a male presence in their lives that they respected. This seems like something they are truly lacking in their upbringing, whereas the boys have both a tío and a tía as their guardians and parents. I am observing a class with fourth grade girls in it right now, and their behavior is just atrocious. A girl is now walking around and banging on every boy´s desk and hitting them. They pay her no mind. The boys are participating in the lesson and raising their hands so they can go solve problems on the board.
Written in Jessie´s notebook 3/3/2010 (so far behind!!)
My job is going really well right now, all things considered. I was really dreading going to work on Monday morning, and then once I got there and started the day I realized how much I actually enjoy this job. Here are some photos of me in my classroom that I worked so hard to decorate!
The kids are not easy, and each of my 12 students has such distinct needs that it takes a lot of planning for each session. I have so many kids, though, that the planning time I do have usually isn´t sufficient. I have some really bad kids that I have to deal with. Here are some of the various situations that I have had to get through:
Two of my students from the fourth grade are friends and wanted to come to tutoria together. I agreed, on the stipulation that they would be separated if they didn´t behave well or do their work. They are learning about 6 digit numbers right now, adding, subtracting, greater than lesser than etc., so we played a dice game together that incorporated all of these processes. One of the boys lost, as is typical to any game, and he pitched a freakin fit. He yelled at me, saying he hated me and never wanted to come back, and then he ran to the door to try to get out and became even more infuriated when he realized that the door was locked and he needed a key to open it. I always lock my door from the inside for this very reason, as I learned early on. I can´t have my kids barging out of the room whenever they damn well feel like it. They´re my responsibility during this time, and I do not want to have to chase a hysterical kid all over the ranch like I probably would have had to in this situation. I also lock it to protect myself. Kids like to walk around and open doors and raid rooms while you´re working. I need it constantly locked from the inside and out. Anyway, this kid was infuriated and started kicking my fragile door. At least I was able to say some things to him before I escorted him back to his class. He wouldn´t talk or look at me for a week afterwards. I had Stephanie, the volunteer in his hogar, to talk to him about it. The next time I took him from class he was amiable and we had a really good session. I didn´t bring it up because it would only have made things worse. I had his tíos and volunteers to talk to him about it which was sufficient. He loses, though, because we have to keep competition out of tutoria. No fun games for him. His tíos said he is always like that. He is a seriously sore loser. Needless to say, they now come separately. He still loses his temper with me quite a bit, over really tiny things. Last session I had with him, he was so angry with him for making him do a subtraction problem where he had to carry the one. He was SO hotheaded that I kept thinking to myself… “Shit I can´t believe I just sharpened his pencil…” I just need to be careful with him.
One of my girls is a very hard worker, and she is just precious. She is dyslexic, though, so it takes a while to get work done, and it is quite a challenge for me. I have been doing a lot of research to find different exercises I can do with her and one of my other boys that is also dyslexic. One day, we were doing a worksheet together, and she was working really hard. All of a sudden she stopped and stared into space, stopped talking and started crying. She did so for the next 15 minutes until class was over. I did all I could to console her. I told her she could talk to me about anything—whether it be a problem in class, hogar, life, with me…though it didn´t help that day, she seems to have really warmed up to me more. She gets really excited when I come pick her up from class. I later learned that her mother lives here on the ranch in Casa Pasionista—our HIV/AIDS home, and she is in her advanced stages, slowly dying. This type of thing has happened a few times with her. Since I know she knows that she can talk about it if she wants to, instead of pushing her to work or sending her back to class, I´ve found that it is better to just pick out a book and read to her. She really enjoys it, and it is a good distraction.
Another situation I have with one of my kids is that she just refuses to work. She hasn´t said one thing to me from the time we met except: “I don´t want to do this. I won´t do it.” Even when I pick her up from class I say “Hey Sarah*, how are you? How´s school going?” and she just completely ignores me. I still wave to her and say hello and act like she isn´t acting that way…She won´t budge. The other day she threw her paper on the ground and said she refused to do anything. I put my pen down and said, “OK, we don´t have to work, we can talk about what is bothering you, whether it be an issue in your hogar, with me, with school or your friends…or you can leave. She, of course, didn´t want to talk, so she got up and left, stormed out, until she too reached my locked door and kicked it. My poor door won´t make it through the year, I´m sure. I´ve spoken about this situation with her teachers and tías, who are not surprised by this behavior. We will have a meeting soon to discuss the next step that we should take.
I have another student who apparently is a little hellion in class, always causing a ruckus, but he was absolutely wonderful with me. We always had a great time in tutoria together, and he was really progressing and taking in the lessons I taught him. Then he was so bad in English class one day that the teacher (a fellow volunteer) reported him to his tía, and he got in big trouble. Ever since then, he has hated all the volunteers/teachers and will not come back to tutoria. I think I´ll just give him some time and then try it again. *Update as of 3/20* I finally broke him down! I went to his class to pull him out enough times and he refused enough times and I continued to be nice to him and finally broke him down. We had a great session on Thursday, and I´m sure he will continue to come back. He even came to the optional exam study session that I provided for the whole fourth grade class!
It sometimes feels like I only write about the bad. It´s just what occupies me, challenges me, and makes me have to work harder and be more sensitive to all of the stories I am interfering in. But there is so much good here, too. My absolute favorite student, Mayron*, is my little sunshine here. He is 7 years old and in the 2nd grade. He has some sort of disease—not sure of the name—where he has little non-cancerous tumors growing in various places throughout his body. He has one growing behind his ear which is causing him to lose his hearing. He also has a slight facial deformity—one eye is higher than the other—due to a tumor, and it has caused him to have bad eyesight. He hasn´t had glasses for months though, because he broke them. He is so particular about his appearance. One of the first things I saw about him was so endearing. And he hated those glasses. He always walks around with his shirt tucked in perfectly and always adjusting it. When he goes to mass, he wears a tie and he is always straightening it out. The other day they gave him new uniform pants, and he was so proud of them. He kept looking down at them while we walked to tutoria. Before he would leave my aula, though, I had to roll up his pants (which are about a foot too long) so that the plaid squares matched up perfectly, color and all. This has now become a regular routine. He is just a tiny little guy, but he carries himself in such a mature way. This is him: I need to get a better picture.
He works SO hard in tutoria. He loves learning, and he tries so hard. When he writes, he sticks his tongue out. The other day while we were walking to the classroom he asked if I could give him homework today, which I´m not supposed to do. He begged me though, so while he was working I made him a worksheet with addition and word problems. He carried it so proudly back to his classroom and slipped it neatly into his backpack. When we play games, he always makes me choose a different country to represent each time. He is always Honduras. He always draws flags for each team. Once he drew a cross between a Honduras flag and an American flag and gave it to me, with both our names on the back. I just got back from walking him to the church for bible study, because his hogar left him behind and he didn´t want to walk alone in the dark. I just love him! I wish I could say his real name here because I even love that! The funny part about it is that his sister is the one who gives me the most trouble in tutoria. She is the one that refuses to work and won´t come back. They are so different, yet they do have matching freckles.
I love the boys in my hogar more than ever. After a frustrating day with the kids at work, I can always look forward to eating, hanging out, playing games and doing homework with them at night. I am writing this in my notebook while they sit around me, doing their work as well. We have a variety of games at the volunteer house (including yahtzee and Spanish scrabble, my favorites!), and I bring different games every night. It´s nice playing games with them, because they love it and Trip hates playing board games and will never play with me! He says they are called “bored” games for a reason. It´s good though, because we both bring different things to the table--different ways of entertaining them. They seem to love us both for different reasons! We are going camping with them for three days on their Semana Santa (spring break), and I´m so psyched! Trip and I are hoping to go to Copán for the rest of the week and staying with a family there that we have a connection with since we can take off work.
One of the boys playing battleship:
All in all, I´m really enjoying my time here. So much so that I really hate going on the internet. First of all, I´m just so tired, and there are so many other things that I´d rather do than walk up to the internet and become absorbed in another world so far away from where I am. Maybe this will pass when I become more homesick later, but for now I don´t feel this yet. We´ve been here for 9 weeks so far, and it feels like two. We´ve pretty much fallen into our rhythm here, which was difficult to do, I think, because to do so we´ve had to interfere in the lives that have been going on here for so long and create our own place here. It took time, but it has been rewarding.
Quick update 3/21/2010
This week has been exhausting! Final exams are next week and unfortunately I had the great idea of offering an optional study session in Spanish and math for the 2-4 grades in their hogares. That means 6 separate sessions (because the boys and girls are separated). Ahh!! I did the math sessions on Thursday, and it was tough, very long hours, but it seems like at least a few of them made some good progress. The Spanish one is tomorrow. Like I really have time to do more planning! The tíos really appreciated the effort though, so I think it was a good thing to do overall. They decided to make it obligatory for their kids, which just meant more mayhem for me to deal with. It was fun, but I will be glad when they´re over!
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Greetings from Shref
The tia (aunt, but they use it here for the people who take care of the kids in the hogares) in our hogar had my number in her phone wrong the other day and she wanted me to fix it. When I looked at it she had my name put in as Shref. Not even one letter right. Even after she added an extra which increased her chances.
Written in my [Trip’s] notebook 2/27/2010:
Last Monday, I decided to work in the mountains, because I really didn’t have any pressing projects, and I really wanted it to be clean when my real boss, Tonin, gets back this week. On my way up there, I ran into the Ranch’s project coordinator, Armin. He is a Swiss gentleman who has lived here for many years and is married to an el salvadorean woman and they have two teenage boys that live here. He asked me if I could go to Tegus tomorrow to start fixing things in the disabled children’s home and the university girls’ home which are side by side and to help a painter he has hired with some things he needs. So I put on my gloves, put on Superfreakonomics, and raked and cleaned all day. Tuesday I packed my necessary tools into my big Europe backpack and made my way into the city, a trip which took two hours. I could have just taken a taxi, but they’re relatively expensive and they get on my nerves so bad, especially when I’m wearing my Europe backpack. They immediately identify me as a gringo and start honking their horn, to which I signal them no in some way. Regardless of my signals, they continue beeping because they just know that I want a taxi because I’m a gringo, and I guess they think gringos all have money and they don’t walk.. They’re incessant, and it irritates me to death. A bus will take me all the way across the city for 15 cents, but it will take me two hours.
Stefan, the director, met me shortly after I arrived and showed me what he needed fixed. There are a myriad of problems between the two houses that need to be taken care of, including plumbing, electrical, carpentry and welding. I fixed a couple sinks and things that were easy fixes and then put together a triple bunk bed for the university girls who live there when they’re in school. There were more girls than there were beds. On the way home, I stopped at the store for some things. I used one of the public buses [which are usually just retired US
My backpack had around 50-60 pounds in it, and by the time I muscled it onto my shoulders, I was in the back of the line, and the bus was pulling off with four or five guys still trying to push their way on in front of me. I was pressed for a decision, so I decided that it wasn’t an option to miss the last bus. With that, I grabbed the bar under the side view mirror [the same bar which some of you already know my history with if you have heard myMorocco US
My backpack had around 50-60 pounds in it, and by the time I muscled it onto my shoulders, I was in the back of the line, and the bus was pulling off with four or five guys still trying to push their way on in front of me. I was pressed for a decision, so I decided that it wasn’t an option to miss the last bus. With that, I grabbed the bar under the side view mirror [the same bar which some of you already know my history with if you have heard my
This is the potable water filtration plant. Which is the biggest part of what I call ¨the mountains¨
Thursday, I decided to go back up to the mountains so they would be really clean for Tonin. When I listen to a book I´m so focused I just work. I´m like a machine set on go. While cleaning, Lenny came up and surprised me. He seemed excited and told me he had a project for me if I could do carpentry. He said, “You did tell me you could do carpentry, right?” I affirmed, and he was so excited to give me a project. Around 1230 I finished and broke for lunch. On the way down, I met Armin, and we chatted about what I had done in Tegus. Then he asked me if Lenny had told me about the other job. I told him no, but he just mentioned that it was a carpentry job but sounded like something I would be interested in helping him with if he could just show me what he needed. Stefan had the idea to buy grain silos so we could store grain when it is cheap and save money buy using the stored grain when the prices are high. He and Armin looked into buying silos, and when Stefan asked around the ranch where would be a good place to store silos, the kitchen staff told him, “in the room behind the kitchen where the silos are.” So he and Armin looked into this room for the first time and found that they already had seven silos, each about 7 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.
They just needed to lift them off the concrete so water could not seep in. So they wanted me to build wood slats to do this. Armin asked me to do this just before lunch on Thursday so I spent the whole afternoon running around and getting stuff for the project.
They just needed to lift them off the concrete so water could not seep in. So they wanted me to build wood slats to do this. Armin asked me to do this just before lunch on Thursday so I spent the whole afternoon running around and getting stuff for the project.
I got some short scrap pieces of 1x 6 lumber and took it to the wood taller (workshop), and they ripped it longways into 3 inch wide strips. Doing this is very involved, because I have to borrow a Motorola two-way radio from one of the important people who has a ranch radio and call for transport. It is a little intimidating to speak Spanish over the radio knowing that all the important people on the ranch are listening. Then I load all the lumber into the truck, unload it, cut it, load it again, then take it to the site where I unload it again. It’s good because I´ve learned quickly how to get favors here from people. Every time I ask for something from the bodega here it´s like I´m asking for a favor, even though it´s my job. So it´s important that I maintain strong relationships with so many different people here on the ranch. I also tried to get everything else I needed together, like screws and taco fitres and a hammer drill since my cordless drill was too small for this project.
My pet peeve with my job has become our maintenance bodega. Along with all our tools in there, we have an expansive arsenal of parts and pieces to fix anything. Aside from the things you´d expect, like every part of a toilet and extensive plumbing and electrical parts, we have a bin full of motherboards for computers, alarm clocks and other small electronics.
At first I thought, “Wow this is great, it´s like I´ve died and gone to maintenance heaven.” Then I started going to find things in there instead of going to the big bodega because it is better to reuse these parts and because if I need a toilet part from the bodega, they give me the whole pack with half the parts to the whole toilet. I went digging for an outdoor faucet head and found 20, but the first 15 they told me don´t work. So I asked if I could take two with different broken parts and mix and match to make one good one, because I figured they had to be keeping them for SOME reason. Lenny told me no, and that I should just go ask for one at the bodega. I told him I would rather reuse one of the 20 we have here, and besides, that´s why we´re keeping them, right? Then I asked, “why do we have so much broken stuff here? Like these broken lightbulbs, what can we do with these?” To which he only shrugged and made a hand motion, which I took to mean, “ Nothing, but we´re Honduran. It´s what we do.” This pisses me off, but I keep looking for parts there first. The other day I needed a gasket for a toilet, and we have a three foot length of wire tied in a circle with like 50 gaskets on it. I grabbed one, and Lenny said, “sirve.” Usually he says, “no sirve,” and although it looked good to me, I immediately though he had said that it doesn´t work. So I started to say, “what is the point of keeping a bad rubber gasket?¨He cut me off and repeated, “Si, sirve,” which stopped my ensuing tirade. I would say that organizing there would be a good project for me, but before I would be able to make any sense of the carnage that is that trainwreck, I will be leaving, and it will just go back to the same illogical junkyard that it is.
This is Nelson in our maintenance shop. He is my best friend here besides Jessie.
Here is Nelson posing with our pole climbing gear on his feet.
At first I thought, “Wow this is great, it´s like I´ve died and gone to maintenance heaven.” Then I started going to find things in there instead of going to the big bodega because it is better to reuse these parts and because if I need a toilet part from the bodega, they give me the whole pack with half the parts to the whole toilet. I went digging for an outdoor faucet head and found 20, but the first 15 they told me don´t work. So I asked if I could take two with different broken parts and mix and match to make one good one, because I figured they had to be keeping them for SOME reason. Lenny told me no, and that I should just go ask for one at the bodega. I told him I would rather reuse one of the 20 we have here, and besides, that´s why we´re keeping them, right? Then I asked, “why do we have so much broken stuff here? Like these broken lightbulbs, what can we do with these?” To which he only shrugged and made a hand motion, which I took to mean, “ Nothing, but we´re Honduran. It´s what we do.” This pisses me off, but I keep looking for parts there first. The other day I needed a gasket for a toilet, and we have a three foot length of wire tied in a circle with like 50 gaskets on it. I grabbed one, and Lenny said, “sirve.” Usually he says, “no sirve,” and although it looked good to me, I immediately though he had said that it doesn´t work. So I started to say, “what is the point of keeping a bad rubber gasket?¨He cut me off and repeated, “Si, sirve,” which stopped my ensuing tirade. I would say that organizing there would be a good project for me, but before I would be able to make any sense of the carnage that is that trainwreck, I will be leaving, and it will just go back to the same illogical junkyard that it is.
Jimmy is the other guy I work with and Lenny is in the background. I don't know the kid.
On Friday morning, I had to go to the woodshop to get two students to help me, because unfortunately Armin had already arranged that. Jessie and I had bought material to make curtains for our room (the children enjoy standing on the ledge and peeping in our room), and I talked to the sewing teacher who agreed to get students to make it into curtains for us. I was supposed to drop off the material and measurements the same time I picked the boys up. I was cutting it close, so I ran because I didn´t want to piss the teacher off. He already acts like he´s pissed all the time. I think he just does this because he thinks it makes people take him more seriously because he´s only 5 feet tall. So I ran there the whole way, and nobody was there, and I realized that I had forgotten the sewing stuff. I ran back, got it and ran back again. (And Jessie wonders why I never want to run with her in the afternoons). The teacher gave me two boys, each about 16 or 17 years old. One was a boy who just studies at NPH and doesn´t live here. The other is from the Discipulos hogar, the hogar just above our boys who come pick on our boys. I had a hard time getting extension cords and the power was out, so we were running off of the giant generator on top of that. I ended up running well over two miles. We finally got working and the externo boy was alright, but the discipulos boy was too cool to work. He intentionally tried to mess things up and gave the other boy dirty looks because he was trying to help me. Then he took off and I had to track him down. Then when they took a snack break they left for an hour and a half. Meanwhile I finished more by myself than we had all morning. At 12 o´clock the boys had to go to class, so the teacher sent me 5 younger boys, ages 12-15 to replace them. Within 15 minutes, I left them doing the work by themselves because they didn´t need me, and I took one boy (who happens to be one of Jessie and my favorite boys and is from the mischievious hogar) and he and I built some stairs (see photo). He did a lot of the work, I just helped him figure out how to structure them and I cut the boards. Between us, we knocked the whole thing out in a couple of hours. I was happy because I was given the project at lunch on Thursday and it was done by the end of the day on Friday.
I didn´t mention that Stefan came by the volunteer house on Thursday night to participate in the proyecto that we had with a boy from our hogar and his family. He asked me how work was going, and I told him that I´d done a lot in the city but I had a lot more to do. I also told him that I was anxious about Tonin coming back, because I felt like I had just gotten into a good rhythm with Lenny and now I have to start over again. He replied, “You´re not like the last maintenance volunteer. He stayed up in the mountains the whole time, but he couldn´t do the things you can and he didn´t have tools. I don´t want this to happen to you. You should be accomplishing more valuable things, so I´m going to tell Tonin that we´re going to send some boys up there to clean every few weeks so you can focus on other projects.
Having fun at Proyect:
So by Friday night after busting my ass all week, I felt more worn out and beat up than a soccer ball here on the ranch. I forgot to mention that on Thursday night after proyecto my tio asked me to bring my circular saw and hammer to hogar to help him with something. When I got there, he started telling me about this picnic shelter they want to build. We talked about the dimensions, the structure and the material. Then I said, “Well this sounds like it´s going to be a good project for us.” He said that tomorrow he is going on vacation tomorrow, for a month, and this is something that I could do with the boys. We´d hopefully be finished by the time he gets back. He asked if this was alright. I told him that yeah, I could do it. He just wanted me to bring a saw and a hammer because he thought he´d have to build a miniature model to show me what he wanted.
I found out about the earthquake in Chile Chile was close to Haiti
It was funny, because when Tonin climbed the pole to disconnect the power, he said he wished he had gloves on, so I pulled some out of my backpack. Later he asked me if I had a thumb wrench, then pliers, then a level, then a chisel, which topped the cake for him, and I had all of them on me. I don´t know what they had planned on doing without tools, because all they had were a couple screw drivers. He thought it was funny, because everything he needed I had, but I thought it was funny, because everything I had he needed. Tonin let me climb the electrical pole and reconnect the power. I could tell he was nervous about the height when he disconnected it, and that´s why I offered. All in all, he loved the box I made, and he was so happy with everything I did to help them put it in. I´m relieved because we´ve gotten started on a really good foot.
It was funny, because when Tonin climbed the pole to disconnect the power, he said he wished he had gloves on, so I pulled some out of my backpack. Later he asked me if I had a thumb wrench, then pliers, then a level, then a chisel, which topped the cake for him, and I had all of them on me. I don´t know what they had planned on doing without tools, because all they had were a couple screw drivers. He thought it was funny, because everything he needed I had, but I thought it was funny, because everything I had he needed. Tonin let me climb the electrical pole and reconnect the power. I could tell he was nervous about the height when he disconnected it, and that´s why I offered. All in all, he loved the box I made, and he was so happy with everything I did to help them put it in. I´m relieved because we´ve gotten started on a really good foot.
After we finished the project, the guys I work with went and climbed a tree for practice with the climbing spikes we have. (See photos).
They think I´m funny, and we always have a great time, but the people I live with don´t think I´m funny for the most part. Jessie says it is sometimes hard to read my sense of humor. I especially have a hard time sometimes with our boss, the volunteer coordinator. For instance, a few weeks back she asked me to fix a sink and hang a mirror when I got a chance. Yesterday, I told her I had time whenever, and she told me that the sink was actually working all of a sudden. So I said, “ Well then maybe we should just wait on the mirror and see if it will hang itself.” She didn´t laugh.
They think I´m funny, and we always have a great time, but the people I live with don´t think I´m funny for the most part. Jessie says it is sometimes hard to read my sense of humor. I especially have a hard time sometimes with our boss, the volunteer coordinator. For instance, a few weeks back she asked me to fix a sink and hang a mirror when I got a chance. Yesterday, I told her I had time whenever, and she told me that the sink was actually working all of a sudden. So I said, “ Well then maybe we should just wait on the mirror and see if it will hang itself.” She didn´t laugh.
We have a doctor named Peter Daly who has done so much here for the ranch, including building a surgical center. He is down here now with his family and he is setting up for a surgical brigade to come here next week. They come and do this four times a year, and the Daly family stays for two weeks each time. The first week is crazy with everyone setting up so that everything goes smoothly for the week that the surgeons are here. This is also when Dr. Daly does consultations with hundreds of patients to line up the surgeries. Some he can help right there on the spot, but he doesn´t speak Spanish, so he gets volunteers to translate for him. Jessie helped him from 12-8 Monday afternoon after she had already worked since 730 at the school, and I helped him Tuesday from 9-1 and Wednesday from 8-12. The first patient I interpreted for had a big abscess on the back of her knee, and we drained that right on the spot. By the next morning, I was wearing surgical gloves and cleaning the area before he gave them injections while I talked to them and held their hands. I tried to get a picture of this, but it was a difficult situation. It was a great experience, and I hope to get to see some of the surgeries this coming week.
Go see more photos at http://www.photobucket.com/jessientrip
Go see more photos at http://www.photobucket.com/jessientrip
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