The water man

So Jessie and I have been placed in the same hogar, called Arca de Noé (Noah´s Ark) with 13-16 year old boys. This is the same hogar that I was in that Saturday when we hauled wood down from the mountains. It is taking a little time for them to warm up to us but it seems that they are. One was passing out cantaloupe the other night, and he switched the piece he had in his hand to give out when he got to Jessie so that he could give her a bigger piece. He had already given me a big piece. When there is not enough food for everyone, they always insist that we get a full serving and then they split the rest between them, no matter what we say. I have been taking these sticks that Jessie found for me at school to hogar every night. They are about a meter long, and I know two martial arts routines that you can do with them. I have already taught them to several of the boys, and we practice them every night. I try to visit the other three hogars, which are in the same building as Arca every night. All of these house the boys age groups younger than Arca, but older than Casa Suyapa.

One night in San Pablo I saw one of our boys from Arca, and he had his arm around the shoulder of one of the younger San Pablo boys, who seemed upset. The volunteer in San Pablo told me that they are brothers. I´m always surprised to find out how so many of these kids are related. We come to know them by hogares which are separated by age groups and gender, so we might know two kids well and not know that they are related. Or six kids for that matter. The volunteers have a program that we call ¨Proyecto,¨ whose purpose is giving siblings more time to interact and maintain their family bonds. Every night, different volunteers bring a different group of siblings to our volunteer house instead of going to their hogar. Then they cook and hang out with the family all together. Those brothers I just mentioned have four other siblings, and they all have Proyecto scheduled for February 25th, which Jessie and I will do with them.

My first day of work, my boss Tonin dedicated the whole day to showing me around the Ranch and teaching me because he is on vacation for the whole month of February. My primary responsibility is to keep the potable water area clean, including the filter and storage tanks and the area around them. There are two water systems: One is filtered for showering, toilets and watering the plants and animals; the other is filtered and treated to be potable. The potable water filtration plant is about the size of a football field and consists of one above ground concrete pool-type structure. It´s like a fifteen foot high concrete maze, about the size of a four car garage where water flows from one section to another through the maze and through sand in some parts and comes out relatively clean in the end. The filtration plant also has several smaller plastic overflow tanks and a large underground concrete potable water reservoir. I spend a few hours every morning cleaning this area and listening to books on tape. I just finished Dan Brown´s “The Lost Symbol,” which one of my best friends gave me for Christmas. Last weekend we went to Tegus for a goodbye party for the old volunteers, and there we downloaded the new “Superfreakonomics” book on iTunes.

I was a little conflicted about my job the fourth week here. This is because of the way things unfolded. I knew coming here that groundskeeping would be part of my job, but only part. My boss left on vacation the second day I was here, so the guy I´m working with now is his assistant. This guy is in his mid-40´s, and one of the other volunteers aptly described him as a Honduran version of Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.” He has worn the same clothes every day since I met him: Navy overalls with a Polo Sport t-shirt. I wanted to clean up the water plant quickly so I could do other stuff, so I knocked it out in 8 hours. When I was done, he told me that I need to work slower. He told me that that is my whole job on the ranch and that I have a whole year to do it. I have come to several conclusions: One is that he doesn´t really know how to manage me. He doesn´t see me as an asset, because he doesn´t know what I can do and doesn´t want to worry about what I´m doing or if I´m doing it right. Another conclusion is that the last guy in my position did manage to stay up at the plant all year, so that´s what they expect, although I´ve been told that the last guy didn´t speak Spanish, even when he left, and he didn´t have tools or the knowledge to use them. My solution has been to talk to the volunteer coordinator and be my own manager. I find my own projects and set my own schedule. I talk to Honduran Lenny for a few minutes every morning and tell him my plans and ask him any questions I may have about what I need to do. Sometimes he tells me some things that he is doing, but more or less he doesn´t care what I do. He is just happy that the plant is cleaner than it was before I got here.

With all that said, he is a really nice guy, and he can fix anything. I did help him some on the first few days with different projects. We had to pull out seven toilets in one of the girls bathrooms at the school and clean roots out of the drain pipes. There were a tangle of tiny little roots all together about the size of my arm that filled the whole pipe. We mixed and reset the toilets in a concrete base which we had chipped up to take them out. I have fixed doors that wouldn´t shut, faucets, drain pipes, toilets, walkie talkies, picnic tables, light switches, light fixtures, backpacks, mounted a chalk board, put in a partition wall, saudered a brake cable, replaced board on playground equipment, built a swing, put the zip back in a zip line, fixed soccer balls, and fixed a fridge that wouldn´t cool.

Most stuff I need I can get from the maintenance workshop or the bodega, where they stock most of the Ranch´s needs from nails or plumbing parts to backpacks, q-tips or broom handles. I only have to sign for whatever I need. So far I´ve only needed two things: a kitchen sink faucet and a handful of those plastic things you use when you screw things into concrete (called tacofichers in Spanish, but in English I don´t know). Today, I asked the lady at the bodega for some boards so I could build bookshelves for the library in the volunteer house. We have stacks of books on the floor and plenty of wall space, so it seems like a good project. She gave me a piece of paper and told me to outline the project, including everything I would need, and get Stefan (director) or Pati (assistant director) to sign off on it. On my way home, I ran into Stefan, and as soon as I started to explain what I wanted to do, he pulled out his pen. I told him that I needed to write it out first, but that all that I really needed was the boards because I already have screws and tacofichers, and I can build the supports out of scrap lumber. Then he asked, “ So you can do carpentry stuff?” I told him yes, and that I can do a lot of plumbing, electrical, concrete work and that I can weld also. He said, “Wow that’s great. We need to give you some projects then. Right off the top of my head, I want someone to go around the whole ranch and find any water leaks anywhere and stop them, because in May we always have a water shortage, and this year it is already dry. Also, we have a house in Tegus with a whole slew of problems, and I might want to just send you there for a week to take care of those.” It seems like so far the hardest part for Jessie and I is over. It has taken a lot to become adjusted, settled, orientated and to the point where we don´t have to depend on someone else for every little thing. Now people depend on me for every little thing. The 13 girl volunteers we live with all call me their husband, because I am the house handy man.

A fine balance

Written in my [Jessie] notebook Feb. 8, 2010:

This experience so far, if I had to sum it up, has really been a great mixture of things: wonderful, frustrating, disheartening, enlightening, and just difficult. You really do come to feel as if you’re a part of a family here. The kids get angry whenever anyone refers to their casa, their familia, as an orphanage. To them, it is so much more than a place where orphans live. That part of this organization I truly believe in. However, there are also a lot of things about this ranch, the orientation that we’ve had to go through and the way that this place has run that has made the rest extremely stressful and very difficult to deal with. Right now, I feel as though I will not have any problems getting through these issues, as difficult as they may be, but there are others who are ready to quit right now. [Added 2 weeks later: Actually, one of the volunteers that came with our group ended up quitting. She left the end of last week. There were discrepancies in what they told her that her job would be and what ended up being the reality, and she just couldn’t handle the change, to make a long story short.]

Each volunteer is dealing with different issues with their jobs, their hogares, and their general lives here, so all of our experiences have been different, but it seems that we are all equally frustrated at this point. To start with, this orientation, which has now lasted almost an entire month, has been completely redundant. Not only for me, who has heard about the mission, the values and the history of Father Wasson and NPH her whole life, but for EVERYONE here because we have all sat through countless meetings with every different person of vague importance on this Ranch hearing this stuff over and over. It is even more frustrating for Trip and I because we already know all of this, and on top of that everything has been interpreted for those who don’t know Spanish as well as we do, so we’re hearing everything twice. It is exhausting. Here we are now, in our fourth week of orientation, and I am writing this in the middle of yet another meeting that we are sitting through because I just can’t bear to hear it again.

School started today, and my classroom is in shambles because I have been so busy sitting through these meetings that I cannot get anything done. Even if I weren’t forced to be in this meeting now, though, I wouldn’t be able to do much right now just because of the way the school here works. Ricarda and I are the only tutors at the school, and last week, when we finally started preparing for our jobs, they told us that they wouldn’t have space for us to each have our own classrooms, which has always been the norm. We were fine with this, and we quickly started preparing the room to fit us and our students. Trip came in and put up a partition for us, we moved a ton of furniture in and out, and we started organizing everything so that it would all fit comfortably. Another teacher was stowing stuff in our room over the break, so we also had an enormous pile of her stuff in the middle of everything that we had to work around. All of this took quite a few hours of work. The next day we went to work, and our boss approached us: “We found you guys a second room so you don’t have to be together!” She told us this last Wednesday. Today is Monday and we STILL do not have the keys for the second room so that we can start moving Ricarda into the other one. The administrators here have very high expectations when it comes to decorating our rooms, but we cannot even start this either because they haven’t gotten around to giving us the supplies that we need to do so. My room is full of dead bugs, cockroaches, dirt and furniture and another teacher’s storage. My boss is up my ass because we need to finish planning our activities and lessons for Spanish and Math for the entire quarter by this week even though we haven’t received any info from the teachers or the rosters for the kids we’ll have, so we can’t even start planning yet. Did I mention that school started TODAY? It is just a lot to deal with, and these are only the stressful things going on in my job.

The kids are both the most fun and the most difficult part of being here. They steal your things if given the chance, they climb over the courtyard walls and take anything left outside, many of them are mean to each other and some are particularly mean to those with disabilities… but I have also seen some amazing acts of caring and of sharing and of hard work. I have already had some great times with many of the kids, and the boys in our hogar are warming up to us [we were assigned to the 13-16 year old boys who we will be with for the duration of our stay. We will be with them for dinner every night from 6-8, on holidays, and all weekend every other weekend]. There’s a great dichotomy of emotions that I feel toward the kids here now. Here is an example of why:

In our second week here, I was walking back home in the middle of the day to get something. 6 girls about 7-9 years old ran up to me and started screaming in my ears. I laughed them off, calmed them down, and told them I’d be right back. When I was almost home, I looked back and realized that they were all running at me. Before I had a chance to react, they attacked me. I was wearing a light scarf to cover my tattoo, and two girls started pulling on it and choking me while other girls were pulling at my dangly earrings and another girl was trying to pull down my pants. They were laughing and smiling through the whole thing. When I finally was able to shove all of them off of me, I got to our front gate and they started covering the lock so I couldn’t get in. I finally did, I yelled at them, and they took off. I tracked down their tia [caretaker, mother, what have you], and I told her what happened and I was able to tell her the name of one girl. As soon as I told her one name, she knew who the others were immediately. Apparently, they are a known “gang” that enjoys terrorizing people on the ranch. That day, I was working as a tia to a different girl’s hogar, and it wasn’t long until word spread about the whole thing. When we were all eating dinner one of the girls ran in and yelled at me, cursing in front of everybody. It seems that she didn’t like that I told on her. The group of girls who I had been with all day and had come to like me grabbed my arm and marched me right up to their tia once again and told her what had happened. This then turned into an intervention. The tia brought me and all the girls in the gang into their room and they all apologized and we had a long talk about it. Although one girl was laughing through the whole thing, I was really happy with the way the situation was handled. I thought that the situation had been diffused, but two weeks later the girls broke into my classroom while I was in it. Nothing really happened, but it is clear that they didn’t learn anything from the experience.

Current entry, written February 16, 2010…

We have really been enjoying the boys in our hogar for the most part. Having dinner, playing games and spending time with them every night has been been a nice way to end the day. They’re teenagers. Some of them are more willing to talk to and will only give you one word answers while. I think we’ll just have to be patient with them. Others will talk your ear off. Two of the boys in particular have really opened up to me. They don’t mind sharing their stories, it seems, but you just need to approach the subject the right way at the right time. I think it is really important that we have these difficult conversations with the boys so that our time with them will be more meaningful. It seems that there is still a void between me and those who haven’t shared their stories. Ever since Pedro y Chele [names changed] told me their stories, they have had more respect for me and our conversations, and I think this is because they know that I understand where they are coming from. Many of them have lived here for many years, but some have come only recently. While it really is sad to see kids here that are so young, it seems better to me that they are here sooner than later, after they have spent so many years in fucked up situations or having dealt with more tragedy and hardship.

Pedro, for example, has been here less than a year now. His mother was a drug dealer and she died just before he and his siblings came here. His younger sister, who is four years old, is a handful, though adorable. I was tying a kid’s shoe one day and she walked up behind me and barfed all over my back. Not intentionally, of course, but it smelled wonderful. Anyway, it seems that Pedro has more issues about being here than those that have been here for many years. He told me that he hates it here, although he always seems happy. It is certainly a difficult life to get used to, especially if you’re used to having freedom and an unsupervised life with a mother who was never there. Here, you can never be alone or have any private space.

It is up to the volunteers here to decide what to do for the kid's birthdays. If you don't do anything, they won't have a celebration. Most of the volunteers do one cake a month to celebrate all of the birthdays, but Trip and
I decided to do one for every birthday since there are two of us. We also wanted to make it more special and personal by having the birthday boy come to our volunteer kitchen and cook it with us. We had our first birthday the other day, and it was a great success! Tomas** loved it, and he told us he had never baked a cake before. He jumped in and did all the dishes and cleaned everything up before we even thought about doing it. He also was in charge of making sure that everyone in the hogar got an equal piece. Here are some photos of the experience--

 

 

 

Birthday boy making sure everyone gets an equal slice:

Here are some pictures of the boys in our hogar:

Repartiendo the food. It comes to each hogar in that red cooler, the drink comes in a bucket, and then they divide it up between everyone. The boys are shelling the hard boiled eggs. The menu: Hard boiled egg, rice, and a piece of hard, salty cheese. 

We have a new kid coming to our hogar this week. Before they can go live in their hogares, they have to spend a week at the clinic undergoing health and various other exams. Honduras has an appalling rate of HIV, and there are 25 kids here on the ranch who have it. One of the boys that I tutor, 11 years old, has HIV.  They take these precautions so that they’re fully aware of all of the cases of these types of diseases. This kid is fifteen years old, and he seems so shy. Who wouldn’t be, I guess, coming into this type of atmosphere? It is probable that his mother just died also, so he is dealing with a lot right now. He came to the ranch with 5 other siblings. Trip went to visit him at the clinic today. He brought him some cookies and a book to read, because he said that it was really boring there. He is coming to our hogar for good on Wednesday, so Trip and I are going to make a cake to celebrate his bienvenido! 

Work has gotten better since my previous entry, but it is still laborious to get anything done that depends on anyone else. They are still testing the students, so they don’t even know who needs tutoring yet. I have been busy making worksheets and coming up with various activities to teach the themes that the teachers are working on now. Hopefully I will start tutoring by the end of the week.

Writing this blog has been an arduous task hanging over my head for the three weeks that I haven’t written. There are just so many things to say and tell you all about that it seems so daunting every day. We have a two hour break every day, and when I actually do have that time free I just feel like playing guitar, reading, running or napping. It is important for me to set aside time for myself  and blogging just hasn’t been that outlet. I have been writing things for myself, and I just need to realize that I simply can’t writing it all! I’m sure going to talk your ears off about this whole experience when I get back, though! There are so many things going on that I could write about every minute of every day.

Our time off has been precious. So far we have had one free weekend. We decided to take a bus to a national park called La Tigra. We rented a little cabin there for $25 a night [super expensive compared to most of the places you can stay in Honduras, but we decided to splurge!]. A German couple owns the place, and they cook your meals for $3 a meal with things they grow on their property, and it is all vegetarian and delicious! They also made their own fruit wine, jellies, syrups and salsas. We had a lovely, relaxing weekend with delicious food and drink for only $125. It was much needed. We also bought some of their homemade jams and salsa. We hiked all day on Saturday. The forest in the park is called bosque nublado [cloud forest], because everything there is so fertile that thousands of plants grow on every branch of the enormous trees there. The views were indescribable, though often blocked a thick fog. I even saw a few toucans, because I woke up early to bird-watch. We will definitely be visiting the German couple again, though I will be thoroughly coating my body with bug spray, as I think we stepped in a tick nest this time. Between us, we had about a hundred deer ticks all over us [Trip calls them seed ticks]. My legs were destroyed!
Here are some photos of our mini vacation!

This is a sleepy Trip sitting down to breakfast.

Admiring the beautiful views and searching for another Toucan!

The toucan I saw:

The porch of our tiny cabin:

Trippy climbing one of the cloudy trees on our hike:

 

 

Looking at the peaceful town of San Juancito:

We have next weekend off, and I think we’ll be traveling to Valle de Angeles, which is a small mining town known for its artesania [crafts]. It’s only about 20 minutes from Tegus, and it should be a nice little break! Sorry this is so long. I miss you all.

We put up new photos. Check it out: http://www.photobucket.com/jessientrip . On the left click Hondurasàvacation/settling in. Enjoy. We have taken some great videos of the boys in our hogar goofing off, too. We will hopefully upload at least one this weekend. Stay tuned!