Puchabo!

Written in Trip’s notebook March 29, 2010
                        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 5^th, 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 women have reached a level of fashion where they use several different combinations of colors, textures, patterns and shapes in coordination to make a coordinated and aesthetically-pleasing outfit. This is where it gets bad. Older women in the states oftentimes believe that the pinnacle of fashion is matching. For instance, pink shoes, with a pink track suit, complete with pink jewelry and hat. Here, where fashion is everything (so important that at the school, sometimes the administrator evaluations of their work mainly consist of whether or not they like their style), Hondurans have reached a level of fashion that rivals the Golden Girls. I´m sure that their clothes here come in a big pack with all the accessories like Halloween costumes do in the US. It´s like the Room Store for outfits.

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, we use a nod of our foreheads or fingers to indicate the general direction of something. Here they use a kissing motion. I´ve started doing this too, and they think it´s hilarious. I wonder why they think it´s funny when I do it. Do they realize when I do it how they look but they just don´t notice when other Hondurans do it because they are accustomed to it?

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. I learned this word my first week here when I was eating dinner with the mischievious boy´s hogar San Andres. Before dinner, the tia was fussing at the boys for like 5 minutes for not doing their homework and getting bad reports from the teachers. At one point the other tio leaned over and asked me if was understanding what she was saying. I said,  “yes, but what does pucha mean?” He told me it is basically like shoot or crap in english, so now I´ve replaced my whole vocabulary of bad words with pucha. I just use it with different levels of emphasis to replace cuss words of different strengths.

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 5^th, 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 women have reached a level of fashion where they use several different combinations of colors, textures, patterns and shapes in coordination to make a coordinated and aesthetically-pleasing outfit. This is where it gets bad. Older women in the states oftentimes believe that the pinnacle of fashion is matching. For instance, pink shoes, with a pink track suit, complete with pink jewelry and hat. Here, where fashion is everything (so important that at the school, sometimes the administrator evaluations of their work mainly consist of whether or not they like their style), Hondurans have reached a level of fashion that rivals the Golden Girls. I´m sure that their clothes here come in a big pack with all the accessories like Halloween costumes do in the US. It´s like the Room Store for outfits.

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, we use a nod of our foreheads or fingers to indicate the general direction of something. Here they use a kissing motion. I´ve started doing this too, and they think it´s hilarious. I wonder why they think it´s funny when I do it. Do they realize when I do it how they look but they just don´t notice when other Hondurans do it because they are accustomed to it?

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. I learned this word my first week here when I was eating dinner with the mischievious boy´s hogar San Andres. Before dinner, the tia was fussing at the boys for like 5 minutes for not doing their homework and getting bad reports from the teachers. At one point the other tio leaned over and asked me if was understanding what she was saying. I said,  “yes, but what does pucha mean?” He told me it is basically like shoot or crap in english, so now I´ve replaced my whole vocabulary of bad words with pucha. I just use it with different levels of emphasis to replace cuss words of different strengths.

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 5^th, 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 women have reached a level of fashion where they use several different combinations of colors, textures, patterns and shapes in coordination to make a coordinated and aesthetically-pleasing outfit. This is where it gets bad. Older women in the states oftentimes believe that the pinnacle of fashion is matching. For instance, pink shoes, with a pink track suit, complete with pink jewelry and hat. Here, where fashion is everything (so important that at the school, sometimes the administrator evaluations of their work mainly consist of whether or not they like their style), Hondurans have reached a level of fashion that rivals the Golden Girls. I´m sure that their clothes here come in a big pack with all the accessories like Halloween costumes do in the US. It´s like the Room Store for outfits.

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, we use a nod of our foreheads or fingers to indicate the general direction of something. Here they use a kissing motion. I´ve started doing this too, and they think it´s hilarious. I wonder why they think it´s funny when I do it. Do they realize when I do it how they look but they just don´t notice when other Hondurans do it because they are accustomed to it?

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. I learned this word my first week here when I was eating dinner with the mischievious boy´s hogar San Andres. Before dinner, the tia was fussing at the boys for like 5 minutes for not doing their homework and getting bad reports from the teachers. At one point the other tio leaned over and asked me if was understanding what she was saying. I said,  “yes, but what does pucha mean?” He told me it is basically like shoot or crap in english, so now I´ve replaced my whole vocabulary of bad words with pucha. I just use it with different levels of emphasis to replace cuss words of different strengths.

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.