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 school buses] to go back to the city center for 3 lempiras. This is where we do most everything in the city, including shopping. From there we take a 15 passenger van about 5 miles up a steep hill to a gas station on the outskirts of the city where we catch a bus to Talanga and get off at the Ranch. On the way up the mountain, the van got hung up for a while because a tractor trailer was having issues. The hill is so steep that we had to chock behind the tire with a big rock to get started up the hill again. The van was stick shift. By this time I was getting worried about making it back to the ranch, because it was getting dark out and Jessie had already called me twice because she was worried. She had stayed home from work that day, because she caught strep throat from one of the kids. When I got to the bus stop it was dark, and there was a huge line of people pushing to get onto the already packed bus.

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 Morocco bus story], while jogging with my backpack and grocery bags in my left hand. I hopped my left foot onto the platform and swung my right foot onto the front bumper. The guy beside me was also completely outside of the bus, and he was still pushing. We got up to 25 or 30 mph before they had all pushed on and realized that they had a gringo on the bumper. The guy grabbed the grocery bags and my backpack strap and hauled me aboard. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen many things Hondurans have done and do every day, which Americans think is crazy, but I imagine that it is rare that Hondurans think an American is crazy, except when they are volunteering. I talked about this with the guys I work with while we were mucking out the toilets. They can’t understand why I would muck out toilets for $130 a month when I could be making thousands of dollars pushing paper in the US. I didn’t end up getting home until after 8 and I still had to hike a mile to our house. I barely touched the work I had in Tegus, so I returned on Wednesday. I knocked out the most pressing problems and told them I would come back next week. After all of the work on Monday then the long day on Tuesday topped off by another hard day on Wednesday, I felt more worn out than a deck of uno cards here on the ranch.

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.

            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.

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.

Here is Stefan at our hogar one night:

 

            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 the day after it happened from Lenny when we were up in the mountains in the morning. He asked me if Chile was close to Haiti, so I drew a map for him and showed him. One time he asked me if I knew how to drive. He said he can only drive a little. He also told me that he can´t swim. Monday afternoon he asked me to build a wooden box to house the breakers at the school, because the old one was rotted. On Tuesday afternoon/night I worked with Tonin and the boys for hours replacing the box. It was my first big project that I did with them.

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.

            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