Picking Corn, Speaking English, and Drinking Tap Water, or What I am Doing in Indiana

Dear Family, Friends, and Strangers,
Sorry it’s taken so long for me to break this news, but it turns out that I was sent home (Medically Separated in official terminology) in early August because of my unresolved issues with equilibrium. I don’t have too much to say about it. I think Peace Corps made the right decision, as I was and am sick, but my abrupt departure from my community was pretty jarring on everyone involved.

Thanks to all of you who kept tabs on me through this blog. It was always nice to get comments and know that people were interested in what I was doing. As for what I’m doing now, that’s a good question that I’m still trying to figure out.

Peace Out,
Cara

Rain, Bandidos, Dizziness, and The Law

When it Rains, it Pours
Winter arrived near the end of April, bringing afternoon rains that turned all the plants green in a matter of days. Now both creeks and pilas are full and the roads no longer dusty. To me, the water came as an unexpected relief. The replacement of the hot, hair-dryer wind with a hazy humidity has restored a sense of normalcy to the atmosphere, even though it immediately passed the stage of bearable and has become oppressive. It has also solved the town’s water problem for the time being. I can now wash my hands, shower, and flush the toilet whenever I want! It’s not all bucket baths and puddle jumping though. Turns out the rain brings its share of complications as well. There has been a marked increase in the amount of mosquitoes and other biting things hovering around. More frustrating is the condition of the dirt road between my village and the larger town of San Marcos. Combined with the condition of the bus, there isn’t a lot of traveling to and fro.

We are now into our fifth day of nearly constant rain. All of this is great news if you need water to wash your laundry, but a rather unfortunate complication if the next step of the plan was to dry it ever. Thanks to the scabies epidemic, a nearby volunteer owns a first rate iron, but even after three days of hanging and a thorough going over with said iron set to its hottest level, my clothes retain a lingering dampness and an odor best described as a mix of popcorn, cat urine, and barf. On the plus side, I look really snappy now in my wrinkle-free pajamas.

My First Security Incident
I suppose I should let you know that I had a bit of trouble on the road a couple weeks ago. I went with another volunteer to a village on the other side of the protected area that I live in to visit his counterparts. The day started out well enough. It was sunny and beautiful, and we arrived early for our scheduled meeting with the town council, with whom we were planning to fill out a request to place a volunteer in the community. Before we went to the church where the meeting was to take place, we went and visited with the counterparts. One is the leader of a women’s group that makes pine-needle baskets, and I brought some earrings I made out of bottlecaps to show her. After the demo and some coffee and rosquillas, the other volunteer and I went to the meeting place, where absolutely no one was. We sat outside the padlocked church for an hour and a half, and then, as the only people around were a group of young men who had gathered on a nearby porch to stare at us, decided that the town council was not showing up and walked back to the counterpart’s house. She served us an amazing lunch, and just after noon, we headed out on foot up the road to San Marcos, hoping to be picked up by a passerby with a car. The first 20 minutes of the hike went well enough, until we came to a hill with a series of switchbacks, which is ominously called “Mal Paso,” which translates as “Bad Pass.” As we puffed our way up it, a young man with a lime-green hoodie came into view ahead of us. He seemed to be having a much easier time with the hill and soon disappeared around one of the turns. But unfortunately, he reappeared about a minute later with a gun in his hand. He was joined by an accomplice who came up the hill behind us, and the two proceeded to steal our wallets, the other volunteer’s watch, and my cell phone. Then we went our separate directions, us up, them down, and about 5 minutes later, we were passed by a pickup truck which carried us into town where we called Peace Corps and then went to the police station.

Laying down the Law
When we arrived at the station, I still held a faint hope of catching the guys or at least finding our wallets in the ditch so we could get our documents back. The first officer we talked to looked like he was about 17. We said we had been robbed and tried to describe where (this was before I learned the bit about the area having a name), and then he called the chief who rolled up a couple minutes later in an oversized pickup filled with five other officers. They piled out and the chief asked us if we thought we could recognize the thieves. We decided we might be able to, and so me, the other volunteer, and the five cops piled back into the truck and headed out to serve justice. The immediate action took us by surprise as we roared through the streets of San Marcos, but then nearly immediately, we started going the wrong direction. As the other volunteer and I muttered about whether or not we should tell the driver, we suddenly pulled into the town’s gas station where it became apparent that we were not lost, just in need of a fill-up. And a mango, as it turned out. A few minutes later, tank full and mango being consumed by the officer beside me, we tore off again, this time the right way. The thrill of the chase returned, only to be replaced by impatience as the pavement ended and we slowed to a sustained crawl at 15 miles per hour. Perhaps justice would not be as swift as it at first had seemed. The small hope I held of finding the thieves dwindled even more as the police chief blasted music out of her cell phone and the cop beside me finished her mango and began shouting into her own phone at some relative on the other end of the line. Then the hope disappeared altogether when we arrived at the scene of the crime and, instead of investigating or being sneaky or anything like that, we pulled over the first vehicle to pass us in an hour, a truck hauling two cows, and the three cops in the back of our pickup jumped out to demand that the driver show some sort of cattle-hauling paperwork. If the thieves had stuck around, they certainly had plenty of time to clear out, as we had parked in direct view of their hideout. Finally, the other truck was allowed to leave, and we slowly rolled down the hill, where, shockingly, we found no one. Then we continued into the community that we had been visiting. We came upon a woman and two girls who appeared to be walking in the direction of the crime, but when the police rolled down their windows, it was only to ask where one of town leaders lived, and no mention was made of the fact that the road wasn’t particularly safe at the moment. Then we rolled slowly past the town outside of which we had been robbed, stopping only to ask whose bicycle was parked outside a corner store, and continued on to the next village. Our purpose became increasingly muddled as we cruised through that town, arrived at a gate and through it left the road, picked up some hitchhikers, and bounced down a faint trail only to arrive at a lonely health center where we parked. The hitchhikers and all the police officers got out, leaving the other volunteer and myself to bemoan the loss of our afternoon and the absolute pointlessness of the entire endeavor. After a few minutes, the police returned and we were off again, back in the direction we had come from. When we got back to the first town, we asked the same shopkeeper where “Tonio” was and then left the main road again. At the first intersection, we stopped and one of the officers in the back of the truck yelled down a hill for Tonio. A man who appeared to be in his 60s said that he was Tonio, and the cops waved him over, so he hobbled up the hill and stopped at the driver’s side window. This was the following conversation:
Him: “How are you?”
Chief: “We’re here...Patrolling.”
Long pause.
Chief: “What do you do?”
Him: “I’m a farmer.”
Chief: “Is that your store?”
Him: “Yes.”
Pause.
Him: “Well, if there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.”
Pause.
Him: “Yeah, so just let me know.”
Chief: “Alright.”
Again, note the non-mention of the robbery. As he walked slowly back down his hill, we turned the truck around and headed back to San Marcos, stopping only once to harass a young man with a car battery who was standing by the road even though the other volunteer and I had explained to the driver that he was not the guy.

When we finished patrolling, we were dropped off at the station of a different branch of the Honduran police, where we were to fill out reports on what had happened. The other volunteer and I were separated and gave our individual statements. One of the investigators also typed up an official incident report for both of us to take with us in case we needed to explain why we had no identification. This one began with the line, “Resulta que, soy norteamericano...,” meaning, “Turns out, I’m from North America...,” which apparently was enough to explain why we were robbed.

The next day, the volunteer and I were leaving the San Marcos Park where we had been manning a very unpopular Environment table at a women’s fair, when the truck pulled in front of us in the street. The driver whisper asked us if we could go to the station, which was just around the corner, and we said yes as he drove away. When we arrived, two young men were being unhandcuffed from the back of the truck bed. The driver motioned us into his office and said they had caught the thieves and we were there to identify them. It should be noted that the handcuffed youths certainly must have known what we were there to do, because the news that two gringos had been robbed outside their town the day before had by then undoubtedly spread throughout the whole community. This managed to contribute to the awkwardness when they were casually led past the office door, and we said, “No, that’s not them,” because it wasn’t. We left the station, and immediately, the other volunteer received a phone call from the chief asking us to come to the station because they had caught the guys. He explained that we had just come from there and that it wasn’t them, and she asked if we were sure, because they matched our description—they both were wearing hats. He said we were sure. As they talked on the phone, we had walked back to the station, where we saw the two non-criminals unload their bikes from the truck and prepare for what would probably be their hour or so ride home.

The Dizzies and Other Diseases
Alright, that’s enough about crime. Let’s talk about my health. In my last post, I alluded to a problem I’ve been having with dizziness. After many days in the capital city getting tests, it has been determined that a virus somehow attacked my inner left ear and caused the auditory nerve to get all inflamed and slow, and because of this, I now have daily bouts of vertigo and unsteadiness. The good news is that it’s getting better. Unfortunately, progress is slow and the weather isn’t really helping. Still, I’m finally starting to feel better. I have also managed to cultivate a rash around my mouth and nose that makes it look like I have constant razor burn, which would be somewhat acceptable if I were a man, but I am not. Every day I shellac make-up over it, but it has proven stubborn, and even after two months of medicated cream, I continue to look increasingly gross.

Travel Plans, or All Those Packages You Were Going to Send
Wait—Don’t do it! I’m coming home in July, from the 1st to the 11th, so save your postage and just get them to my parents’ house. If you live in the area or are planning to be around, get ready, cause my visit is going to be great.

Guatemala, Scabies, Summertime, and Terrible Spanish

What I’ve Been Doing
Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything, and I suppose I should first fill you in a bit on what I’ve been up to. I’ve actually been pretty busy since my last post. A woman from a nearby town secured an eco-stove project for my community through the Rotary Club, and I’ve been doing a lot of walking and message carrying in an effort to help coordinate things. Right before the stove materials came, we set up a system of neighborhood leaders to help organize groups of 6-13 families. This system worked very well and saved me from having to visit all 78 houses whenever there was news to deliver. This week, the final stoves were built. Oh...you’re probably wondering what an eco-stove is. Basically, the word refers to a variety of wood-burning stoves that have been designed to be more efficient and therefore use less firewood. They also have chimneys to take the smoke out of the kitchen, instead of leaving it inside the way conventional stoves do.

In addition to this, I have continued to work on the latrine project. Although the grant I wrote fell through, we managed to get nearly 32,000 Lempiras from the village’s Municipality. We still need around 90,000 Lempiras, or roughly $5,000, and I am working on a new grant with the Town Council.

Finally, the attempt to secure a new water source continues to plod along. After various water flow tests and talks with a nearby landowner, it looks like we could possibly get access to a new spring. Unfortunately, the process has stalled due to a health issue I’ve been having. For a few months now, I’ve been getting extremely dizzy, and I’m currently in the capital city, Tegucigalpa having various tests done to try to figure out what’s going on. This means that I’m out of my community, and progress on the water source issue has stalled.

What Season It Is
I thought I’d take a moment to write about the seasons here in Honduras. You geography buffs out there probably know that Honduras is part of North America and north of the equator. Therefore, it might be surprising to you that the season here is called summer, and has been since November. If you try to pin a Honduran down on the season situation, you will probably end up having the same conversation that I have had various times with people from my community and others. Apparently, there are two seasons that last for 6 months each. During winter, it rains, and during summer, it does not. One should not associate warm weather with summer, however, because it also encompasses the coldest months of November, December, and January. Where it gets confusing is around the month of May, when I have been told it also rains. Someone told me that this month was called spring, even though this directly contradicted his insistence that each of the two seasons lasted half a year. After the rains in May, summer returns for a few months and lasts until the true wet season comes in the months that in Indiana are called fall.

Life Without Water
I arrived in October, during the height of the rainy season, but the only reason I knew it was the rainy season was that people told me. This was an exceptionally dry year in an already dry part of the country, and although we had a few rainy days in November, it has now been several months since we had a good soaking rain. About 36 households in my town, including my host family, receive drinkable water from a system that uses gravity to pipe water from a hilltop spring. I have been told since my arrival that during the summer, water is rationed. However, this year, my host family of 9 including me receives about ¾ a pila (tank) of water every 3-4 days (versus a tank and a half every two days during less dry times). With the cooking, washing, and bathing, the water we get now generally lasts 1-2 days, which leaves us with 1-2 more days of nothing. My host sisters and I carry buckets to stagnant pools in what used to be a stream and haul the water to the house. There is another source about ½ a mile away up a steep hill, which is where the family used to get water before the town’s system was installed. However, in those days, there were hoses that carried the water to the pila that have since fallen into disrepair. Sometimes the family hikes up there to bathe or haul cleaner water. In an effort to ease the drain on the family water supply, I have taken to showering and doing laundry at another volunteer’s house in a nearby town. This also makes things a lot easier on me because I don’t have to deal as completely with the reality of having no water.

Since I started writing this, we had one day of heavy clouds and downpouring rain, and it was like the first day of snow, when it comes in early November and catches everyone off guard. The dust that had been hanging in the air and covering the streets and sidewalks was washed away and there was a sense of freshness that reminded me of when everything is covered in a coating of white flakes.

Spanish and Class
One of the goals of the Protected Areas Management program is to work in schools, both with students and teachers. I have yet to really establish a presence in the town’s elementary school, so when I heard that a local NGO was coming to help build a drip-irrigation system, I decided to drop in and see how things went. I showed up early, during recess, and felt very useless as the students exited the cinderblock classrooms. Honduran law mandates that if a school has more than 40 students per teacher, a new teacher must be assigned. Last year, there were three teachers in my town, but this year for some reason, there are only two, even though the number of students has grown. Therefore, when the 50+ students of grades 1, 3, and 4 returned to the classroom, the chaos of the schoolyard continued. The teacher had not yet come back, and I grew increasingly flustered and awkward feeling in the front of the classroom of staring and chattering children. I finally decided to start up a conversation with some 4th graders, but my Spanish failed me, as it frequently does when I need it most. I started out by asking something about how they liked their classroom, but instead of using the correct word “aula”, I substituted the word “jaula”, which means cage. I caught my mistake immediately, but the thought of their school as a cage was still amusing, and they laughed quietly, which also is a common reaction among shy young girls when they don’t want to answer a question, so I tried to encourage them to talk to me by telling them not to have peña. Unfortunately, unlike “pena” which means shyness, “peña” means boulder or clique of friends, so I suppose I told them not to be so cliquish. At this point, I decided to cut my losses and go look at a bookshelf for a while until the teacher returned. When he came back, I set to work observing the classroom dynamic, and before too much time had passed, I forgot how terrible my Spanish was and decided to start a conversation with the teacher. Noticing that he was left-handed, I thought I would mention that I am too. Trying to ease into the topic, I began with the statement, “Usted es cerdo.” This proved to be the worst mistake of the three, because instead of telling him that he was “surdo” or left-handed, I had just told him he was a pig. I immediately stuttered “surdo...surdo”, and he made no comment. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the morning.

If You Get The Scabies, It’s Not Your Fault
When we were in the Dominican Republic just beginning our training, we had several sessions from a Peace Corps doctor about the various diseases and infirmities we might contract during our service. I remember one lecture particularly well because it began with the above written sentence of consolation, which I thought was funny because why would it be your fault if you got The Scabies. Unfortunately, my attention was apparently grabbed by the headline, and I failed to listen to the actual symptoms. Had I listened better, I would probably have known that the suspicious new bites I woke up with every day were not from passing insects, but rather from the family of mites living in my skin. It turns out that I have probably been infested since mid-October or so. But it’s not my fault. I’m not sure where they came from. After I raised the alarm, other volunteers started wondering about their morning bug bites, and now several of us have confirmed cases. The internet hosts a lot of sites with conflicting information, so I’m no longer sure if they are easy to contract or hard, whether they live in hordes like skin termites or if there are only 10-12 on your body at one time, and if you have to boil and iron all the fabric you’ve ever touched or if, to get rid of them, all you need to do is avoid all the fabric you’ve ever touched for a couple of days by which time The Scabies will have died. I have opted to boil and iron almost all my clothes, which is a bummer cause now they’re all kind of ruined. The good news is that between the laundry and applying an anti-scabies cream, I seem to have cleared them out of my system.

Concise Description of My Trip to Guatemala
In the beginning of February, a nearby volunteer named Patrick and I went to Guatemala to meet up with my mother, aunt, and sister. The trip began with a grueling 25-hour bus journey from Honduras to an island town called Flores in the department of Peten. Patrick and I arrived at around 5am and watched the sunrise before wandering the empty streets and brushing our teeth on the town’s boardwalk. At around 7, we finally found a restaurant that was open, and had a leisurely breakfast. The plan was to relax for the morning and meet up with my family in the early afternoon to check into our hotel room on the edge of the Tikal Ruins National Park. Things went more or less smoothly, and that evening, we watched the sun set from Temple II before eating an amazing dinner. The next day, we explored the ruins some more and then headed back to Flores to eat and watch the Superbowl. In the morning, we took a bus and then a boat the next day to an area called Rio Dulce, where we spent the next few days soaking in hot springs and kayaking to a jungle waterfall. And eating. Then we boated and bussed to Antigua. My sister, Patrick, and I set off at 5 the next morning to climb the volcano Pacaya. After a hike that was doubtless made easier by my recent months climbing steep hills, we arrived in a steam filled valley, which we crossed, and then climbed out of on young volcanic rock that crunched under our footsteps. We arrived at a somewhat flat area that dead-ended in a slithering lava flow. The guides dipped walking sticks into it and encouraged us to do the same, which we did, watching the sticks catch on fire as soon as they touched the raw lava. Then we climbed up onto a newer hotter crust with glasslike shards that shattered as we stepped on them. About six inches below our feet under the solid crust, we could see flowing stone. Eventually we hiked back down and spent the rest of the day exploring Antigua. The next morning, we boarded another bus and headed for Panajachel, a touristy town on the shores of Lake Atitlan. From there, we visited the village of Santiago Atitlan and then ate Thai food. The next day was our last as a group. We returned to Antigua, enjoyed a final delicious meal, spent the night, and headed back to our respective countries in the morning.

Christmas Past

Thank You!
Thanks to everyone who sent me Christmas presents! I’m overwhelmed by the amount of packages and drawings and letters and peanut butter that I’ve received. I feel very special to have so many people sending me things, so thanks a lot, and I should add that I’m good on peanut butter for at least the next few months.

Christmas Time Was Here
Let me start by saying Merry Christmas to all! I know it’s come and gone, but I hope it was great. As you can imagine, Christmas here is much different than it is in the US. It kind of snuck up on me in the middle of an abnormally hot December, and passed both quickly and slowly. In the nine afternoons leading up to the 25th, the Catholic church held a series of ceremonies called Posadas, which means “Inns.” Each celebration was held in a different house and began with a few people standing inside and the rest standing outside the closed front door. Someone on the outside would knock, and the inhabitants would answer in a song that went back and forth between the parties and explained the search of Mary and Joseph for a place to stay. The song ends with the couple’s acceptance into the house and was followed each afternoon by a short homily and prayers. Then coffee and bread were handed out and we all returned home. The final Posada was held on December 24th in the church. It began later than the others, at 6:30, and was conducted by candlelight, less for the ambiance and more for the lack of electricity. Another Christmas tradition is setting off fireworks, so the ceremony was punctuated by flashes and cracks and the air smelled of gunpowder. I learned the day before Christmas Eve that the big day for celebrations is the 24th. This proved to be true. Most households celebrate on the 24th by cooking a traditional food called “nacatamales.” These are made from a batter of ground corn, spices, and margarine, which is then spread on a steamed banana leaf, layered with rice, potatoes, chicken, and other variables, folded up into a rough cylinder, and boiled until solid. However, this year, my host family decided to switch it up and cook arroz con pollo, so I wandered over to a neighbor’s house to watch her make the nacatamales and feel more traditional. It was a good choice because, while nacatamale quality can be a bit of a mixed bag, hers were delicious.
On the 25th, I ate a nacatamale for breakfast and then found myself without further plans. I spent most of the day hanging around my house while my host family listened to Christmas carols. The majority of these were American songs translated into Spanish, but with a much higher occurrence of the word “Navidad” and fewer references to snow.

2010
Although my Christmas was rather anticlimactic, I rang in the New Year with a bang by meeting up with a group of other volunteers in the western part of Honduras, where we camped out for two nights and climbed the country’s highest mountain. After a harrowing multi-day journey from my town to Gracias, Lempira, I set out on the morning of the 30th with a group of 11 volunteers. We climbed switchbacks for about 5 hours before arriving at a brand new campsite complete with a shelter and latrine. The group got to work setting up tents and starting cooking fires, and before it was dark, we all had dinner and beds.

The next day, we intended to get up really early and hike to the summit, a trip that was estimated to take about 5 hours and involve some rigorous climbing. However, we didn’t really get on our way until about 10, and the hike took about 8 hours, so...it was a long day. The hike itself was rough but worth it. After practically crawling up a few hours’ worth of switchbacks so steep that hands were required, we reached a relatively flatter but still not very flat section of mountain that after a few more hours led us to the peak. We ate lunch in a cloud which lifted a bit right as we left to reveal mountains below us, and then walked back down the trail through trees covered in years of moss and bromeliads. The hike back was faster, largely because it involved a lot of sliding down the crazy slope we had just climbed. That night after dinner, we made plans to try to stay up until midnight, but then someone looked at their watch in the dark and found that it was 6:45. However, five of us stuck it out and celebrated the change of years by throwing pine needles on the fire and watching it blaze up for a few seconds. Then in the morning, we packed up our camp and flew down the mountain in a couple of hours.

Honduran Things I’ve been Doing
It seems that now is the season to paint/whiten houses in Honduras. For most families, this involves gathering a specific variety of rock, which must invariably be hauled from “way up there,” crushing it to powder with a wooden post, sifting it until it is nothing but dust, adding a little bit of water, and slapping in onto the adobe walls. The day before Christmas Eve, I invited myself over to a friend’s house to try my hand at it. She let me be involved in every part of the process, and I learned surprising things such as the fact that the stones are lavender, the mud is mauve, and the finished walls appear white once they dry. I also found that rubbing mud on walls is a great way to exfoliate your hands, if you’re into that. Just don’t do it for too long.

A couple of days after Christmas, I was invited by a friend to visit her coffee field and help with the harvest. I went to her house in the late morning and then we waited a while for her nephew to pick us up. The nephew arrived in an oversized red pickup truck that was made to seem even larger by the fact that he was 13 years old and could barely reach the pedals. However, he said he’d been driving since he was 11 and knew how to manage the manual transmission, which is more than I can say. Also, the road is so rutted that it’s impossible to go more than like 5 miles per hour, so I got in the truck and we bounced down the hill to the slope where the coffee was. Picking coffee is reminiscent of picking blueberries, except that the plants are taller and branches have to be eased down so that the berries at the top can be harvested. Also, you’re not as tempted to eat everything you’re picking, although coffee berries do have a sweet layer between the skin and the bean which is called the miel or honey which is sort of good eating if you don’t mind sacrificing the harvest. We wandered up the slope picking coffee that had been left behind to mature and then we reached a jungle area where other neighbors were working. By the time we arrived, it was pretty much time for everyone else to leave, so I ended up only picking about an eighth of a dollar’s worth, but it was a good experience.

Brave Dogs and Tremendous Children
First, I would like to explain that there is a word here “bravo” but it does not mean the thing you say after an especially stirring performance of something. My Spanish-English dictionary defines it as “brave or fierce” but in the vernacular, it means “something that will attack you.” It is most frequently used when describing dogs that bite people, in contrast to “no es bravo,” which means they will only bark and charge.

Another false cognate is “tremenda,” which can be translated as either “tremendous” or as “terrible child who cries all the time.” The latter definition makes it a synonym to “necia” (literally “foolish”) and “malcriado” (literally “poorly raised”), and is frequently used by community members to describe the children at my house. In this post, however, I will use the word in the English-sounding sense.

In my quest to survey the majority of the households in my town, I have regularly been accompanied by small children, generally girls between the ages of 5 and 9. They are usually conscripted by their parents in a conversation that goes something like, “There are fierce dogs at the next house. Borrow my young child to keep you safe.” Despite the fact that numerous children have shown me their dog-bite scars, I have yet to cultivate what is probably a healthy fear of local dogs. In my defense, at this point, I’ve visited about 80 houses in my community and have yet to be bitten, although one dog did kind of ram me with its head and then run away. Therefore, what usually happens upon my arriving at a house is that the little girl gets very nervous, and the dogs bark and circle, and then the home owner comes out and calls the dogs off. Then the child gets to sit through my awkward interview and, if they’re really lucky, continue with me to the next house to repeat the process.

The somewhat undefined commitment of this accompanying has led to some confusion on the part of the borrowed children. Once, I went on a hike to visit a string of houses on a road going vaguely in the direction of Nicaragua. On the way, I collected a neighbor boy who has frequently gone on house calls with me and his unfortunate city cousin. We walked down a long hill and I visited 6 houses, but then, right when I was about to go to the last house, my neighbor informed me that his cousin was crying. I looked around a fence and found that this indeed was true, so I asked why, and was told that the cousin had decided that I was kidnapping him and taking him to Nicaragua. Considering that it had been a couple hours and we had been walking in the direction of the border, I suppose that this was a reasonable guess, but, after assuring my neighbor that I wouldn’t get attacked by dogs and I knew my way back, I released them both from my service.

Other packs of tremendous children have led me up and down hillsides, over creeks, through fields brimming with ticks, and into caves. Thankfully, there has been no more crying. I now enjoy the distinction of having my name shouted across valleys and lakes by children whose names I do not know who see me from afar and want to know where I am going and if I want accompaniment because there are brave dogs, you know.

P.S.
I wrote that last section a long time ago. I have since finished my latrine survey and submitted a grant proposal. Now I am in the process of notifying community members about who is and who is not in the project.

A new crisis has arisen because this year was abnormally dry and the water source that feeds the town is not sufficient. This means a lot of dredging cloudy water from stagnant streams and hauling it to houses. There is a large ranch nearby that has a good water source, and now I’m working with the local water board to try to get permission to use it.

The one where I write about my birthday...

What I’ve been doing
So I’ve been in my site for about two months now, and you’re all probably asking yourselves what I’ve been up to. Peace Corps policy is for volunteers to spend the first three months getting to know people before jumping into major commitments, but my site is unique in that another volunteer had already started a latrine project in the village, so I have something concrete to work on. As a community, we decided that the next step for the project is a needs assessment of the houses involved. This has come as a happy assignment for me because it gives me something to talk about when I visit strangers’ houses and comes as an alternative to just sitting there for several minutes after introducing myself and asking who they are and then wishing I had more to say. After a month, I have completed 71 of the 75 surveys, and I have high hopes of finishing things up this week. The next step will be to present the information to the town council and then try to find funding sources. Other, generally less productive activities include going to many meetings of various groups. On the upside, I attended a vinegar making workshop, so now I can kind of do that.

Happy Birthday to Me. And Dagoberto.
A former volunteer once said that Peace Corps is kind of like your worst day of middle school every day. Generally, I don’t find that to be the case, but on my birthday, I found myself frequently thinking back to that most awkward of rites of passage: the middle school dance, and comparing it to the dance I found myself at. Before you get the wrong idea and think that the town threw me a party, I should explain that my birthday happens to coincide with the birthday of the young son (Dagoberto) of one of the wealthiest landowners in my village. I was invited to celebrate with the rest of the town up at their mountaintop coffee plantation. It was my first Honduran birthday party, and you probably haven’t been to many either, so I’ll try to share the experience as best I can. First, to set the scene, imagine a three year-old’s birthday party. There is a piñata, games are played, party favors are handed out, and cake is distributed while a song is sung. There are various hints that this party is in Honduras. The majority of the guests are wearing cowboy hats and boots, and many men including the guy dangling the piñata are also packing handguns in holsters tucked into their Wranglers. A Mariachi band accompanies the swarming children. Then as night falls, the children suddenly find that the party is no longer theirs, and the band is replaced by speakers blasting Ranchero music and Punta. They go inside to chew on party favor candy and blow party favor whistles, and the driveway becomes a dance floor.

Apparently, my inability to dance had been the talk of the town during the weeks leading up to the big event. Unfortunately for me, it was considered more of a challenge than a deterrent. Many people grinningly told me that I was going to learn to dance, and I was told a few days before my birthday that the host of the party had even called a dance with me in advance. Therefore, I felt a lot of pressure to participate despite my terror of dancing and lack of coordination. As the dance began, I found myself sitting on a bench beside my host sister wondering how long this thing was going to last, and observing that in striking contrast to my fellow middle school students, everyone at this party knew how to move. Men began walking over to my host sister and asking her to dance. She would tactfully turn them down, and then they would ask me. I decided it was better not to dance with the guys that she wouldn’t dance with, so I would mutter that I couldn’t dance, and they would offer to teach me, and then I would say no, and that’s how we spent at least an hour. Some guys grew bolder and started to ask me before asking my host sister, but since they used lines like “Dance with me, Gringita” or blew smoke in my face, I turned them down too. Finally, a female host-distant relative insisted that I let her teach me, and I gave in. To my instant regret, I let her lead me to an open space that happened to be in front of 10 or so staring young men, and there begin her lesson, which consisted of her moving fluidly and looking great and me kind of bending my knees awkwardly a few times and then covering my face with my hands and returning to the bench. She tried a new tactic then, and set me up with a quiet, middle-aged partner who led me toward the middle of the floor and patiently danced with me through three painful songs before admitting defeat and letting me sit down. I danced for about thirty seconds with the man who had claimed a dance in advance, but he too gave up, and then I decided it was time to retreat to the kitchen where I drank some Coke for a while and then guiltily headed back to the dance floor. As I descended the porch stairs, the brother of a friend met me and quickly took my hand and led me into the crowd. It was there that I learned he was somewhat past tipsy and interested in dancing very closely, which I was not interested in. I also learned that as the two of us were probably the tallest couple there, we drew even more attention than I had been drawing on my own, which increased my embarrassment and made my movements even less graceful. We danced to two long songs, and then, for the first time ever, I was relieved to hear the Punta dance beat begin, because it meant I could escape the floor. Unfortunately, when I explained the plan to my dance partner, he decided to accompany me, and so, taking my hand awkwardly, he led me over to the benches, where I was treated to a long monologue about my beauty. Eventually, my host sister-in-law walked over and told me that my host mother needed to see me in the kitchen, so I extricated myself and followed her a short distance before she whispered that it had been a lie, and I thanked her for saving me. She encouraged me to continue dancing, but by this time, between the social mortification and the fact that all I’d had to drink for five hours was Coke, I was feeling rather ill, and thus spent the next two hours sitting in a dark room full of children and wishing I could leave.

Things that Go Bump in the Night
So this evening, I was in my room trying to decide if I should work on my blog or work on crosswords, and then I realized that there was a rather large cockroach on my bedside table. This was the first roach that I’ve seen in my room, and as my sense of security crashed, I was seized by a vengeful feeling and picked up my candle to smash the intruder. Unfortunately, the candle was beside the roach, and I kind of tipped it off as to the fact that it had been noticed, so it ran under the table and now I can’t get it. Then I looked around for other insects and immediately found a 6-inch long centipede-ish killer worm thing trying to hide in the corner between the wooden slats that form my ceiling and the cement that forms the wall. I clearly don’t know much about these creatures, but I do know that they can be poisonous, and I didn’t want to kill it, I just wanted it to not be in my room, so I emptied a plastic bag and tried to flick it in with a pencil. It resisted and stung my pencil several times very menacingly, and then I managed to flick it onto but not into the bag, which I was holding, and then I panicked and dropped the bag and the killer murderer disappeared onto or into or under my bed which I am now sitting on. I shook out all my sheets and pulled the bed away from the wall and shined my flashlight around and kicked my bedside table a few times, but I haven’t found anything. Hopefully my new roommates won’t emerge and crawl all over me/kill me while I’m asleep. Wish me luck.

P.S. I’m pretty sure nothing deadly has been crawling on me, but about a week after writing the above, I entered my room to find a scorpion scuttling across my wall. Various volunteers had been talking about how difficult scorpions are to kill, so I decided to catch it with a handkerchief and release it outside. I was successful in capturing it, but apparently, I was a little bit more forceful than I realized, and somehow managed to smash it as well. I threw it outside for good measure, and now every morning, I knock my shoes on the floor before putting my feet in them, just in case the scorpion had friends who are on the prowl for new hiding places.

The Road (Rated R)
I thought I’d inform those of you who have ever traveled with me or heard stories of me traveling that the wait is over: I have finally soiled the Honduran countryside (and my shoes) with my motion sick vomit. As someone who distinguished herself when she came to Honduras in college by throwing up in every vehicle she rode in (4), the fact that I’ve been in a Central American country for nearly four months without puking out the window of a moving car or at least demanding that the driver pull over to let me barf on the side of the road is something of a record. Here’s hoping I didn’t turn the proverbial corner today, and that I will regain my equilibrium before I go on any more long dusty drives. In the event that this is not the case, thanks again to all who collected barf bags to add to my stash. I carry them with me always.

The Proverbial Corner is Turned
So I wrote that previous bit, and then two days later, developed a stomach virus? that left me vomiting on the countryside and shoes once again. Unfortunate. I was visiting a neighboring village, and after the incident, I trudged the hour-long hike back as the sun set and I thought dark thoughts. When I got home, I went straight to bed where I stayed until the next afternoon. I’m pretty much over it now, which is wonderful, and I’m not sure why I’m sharing the news except that I know it will embarrass my mother. Take that, Mom.

The Day of Action of Thanks
Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone! Sorry I couldn’t be there, Family. I’m happy to say that I had a great time even though I wasn’t camping by a river in the States. One of the volunteers who lives in San Marcos hosted a get together for fifteen volunteers from various parts of Honduras. We had an expansive menu that included baked brie with cranberries, romaine lettuce salad with bleu cheese, candied walnuts, pears, and balsamic vinaigrette, mashed potatoes, “sweet potatoes”, turkey, and pumpkin pie, and I wish I could convey what a miracle the meal was after months of none of those foods.

Another Note About My Address
I’m happy to say that despite the fact that my address consists of a fake name, my “job” title, and a town I don’t live in, I have been receiving mail. THANK YOU! So far I’ve received 7 of the 8 things that I know I’ve been sent. By my reckoning, it takes about three weeks for mail to get to me. However, if it’s been a while and you haven’t received word of my undying gratitude, maybe send me an email and let me know that the package is in the mail so I know to check for it (although the post officers are very on top of things and track down the San Marcos volunteers whenever anything arrives for anyone in the Peace Corps). Also, practice makes perfect, so don’t let that missing 8th package keep you from sending yours. If you’ve got your box all ready and just can’t decide what to put in it, may I suggest dark chocolate, natural peanut butter (just peanuts and salt if possible), dried unsweetened mango slices from Trader Joe’s (I know that’s really specific), Snickers bars, and maybe some basil seeds. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah right, a box? What has Cara ever sent me?,” consider sending me a letter. If you want, you can also stuff the envelope or box with pictures, newspaper clippings, and surprises. Whatever you want. These are just ideas. I know that this list is pretty heavy on food items, and one reason is that I have a small room with no shelves and therefore am a bit tight on space. Perhaps you can save your more substantive items for my return to the US. Finally, please note that I’ve made a minor change to the address I had posted in the sidebar. The old one works, but this one might work even better. Let’s find out.

Unfortunate Beliefs Concerning Hot Water and Coca Cola...

I know you’re all a bit baffled by the rapidity with which this long blog post has followed the last long blog post, and all I can say is that I spend a lot of time wandering around thinking, because that’s what you do without electricity. One of my apparent hobbies is coming up with catchy titles for things that generally don’t end up fitting into my more chronological posts. However, I’ve had a bit of down time today, so here you are:

Unfortunate Beliefs Concerning Hot Water and Coca Cola
There are various beliefs about hot water here, but they all seem to lead to the conclusion that it is bad for the health and should not be used. For this reason, I have been experiencing some rather chilly bucket baths every morning in my outdoor cement bathhouse. One theory on why hot water is unhealthy is that when you use it, your pores open and the worms and bacteria that is in the water can get into your system more easily. This theory was told to me by another volunteer who heard it from some host siblings who had lived in the US, where, the volunteer argued, they used hot water every day. They agreed, but then explained that the water here is different. Here in my site, where the same water used for bathing is also frequently used for drinking, the somewhat less inventive explanation, that hot water shocks your system too much, prevails. What this means in practical terms is that on my first day with this host family, I asked if I could heat some water for my bath, and my host mom found an old pan outside, dusted it off and filled it with water, and then, once it had started to steam, poured it into a larger bucket. All that seemed promising, however, she went on to scoop several pan-fulls of cold water into the bucket, so that by the time she left me to my bath, the addition of the hot water had been nearly negated. As the temperature of the mornings here has continued to fall, the water temperature has failed to rise, which leaves me shivering and thinking up culturally insensitive blog posts. On a positive note, my host mom has recently started letting me pour in my own cold water. Generally, I react by pouring very little, so that my baths are uncomfortably hot just out of rebellion. Take that. I can also console myself with the fact that I have it a lot better than the two year-old, who spends her bath time standing by the pila crying and sputtering as entirely cold water is poured on her head.

On the subject of Coca Cola, I wanted to share a few conversations I’ve had. Once, during a lunch in San Marcos, the woman beside me began espousing the health benefits of Coke. It is good for the stomach, the kidneys, babies, and cures depression, just like in the commercials. Then a couple days later, I was hanging out in my village in a friend’s house, and her two year-old was running around like crazy, and she said maybe it was because of the Coke, and I said, yes, that’s probably true, and she said, oh, so it’s true what they say about Coke making kids go crazy. I said yes.

Some Things That Have Been Eating At Me
Ticks and paranoia. So far, I’ve found five of the devils eating me, even though I wear long pants and check for them obsessively. They come in various colors and forms, as I realized when I noticed that those two new freckles had legs. Some are big and brown, one was blonde, and two have been tiny. Now every time I have an itch, which is all the time because I’m also very popular with the mosquitoes, I think it’s a tick, and even when I don’t find one, I just assume it’s because I couldn’t see it. Unfortunately for me, tick season here lasts about six months, and due to unseasonable dryness, it started about two weeks early.

How I Almost Died but then Didn’t
Speaking of paranoia and bites, here’s a story: There are these insects called assassin bugs, and they were mentioned once in training, where we learned that if they bite you, they sometimes infect you with a bacteria that grows in your body for up to 30 years, at which point, you die suddenly of heart failure. Another volunteer did a little research, and learned that they generally bite your face, and then poop in or near the bite, and the poop is what carries the disease. So that’s pretty nasty. Those of you who know me well might recall that I have a penchant for contracting or sustaining strange infirmities (brown recluse bite, quasi-lyme disease), and I also have a penchant for believing that I have infirmities that in fact, I do not (hypochondriac). However, when I learned the dirty truth about the assassin bug and Chagas, as the disease is known, I wasn’t terribly worried about being bitten. That is until I saw a giant assassin bug-looking insect on the curtain in my room. I tried to kill it, but somehow was really slow and completely missed. Then I thought about it for a while and decided that it was way too big to actually be one, and I moved on with my life. Or at least, I moved on for a while, until I stayed at a volunteer’s house and discovered a sticker on the door with a life-sized picture of a giant assassin bug. When I returned to my house the next day, I found myself a bit preoccupied with the proximity of possible death. I took down my curtain and poked around in the shadows, but failed to find anything, and so I gave up and decided I was being paranoid. I became even more paranoid the next day, however, when I found what appeared to be the first assassin bug’s somewhat punier sibling, again hanging out on my curtain. I had been instructed that rather than killing it, I should catch it and take it to the nearest health center for analysis, so I gracefully scooped it into a bag with the insect catching skills I developed during field based training. Then I went to take my frigid bath, and as I shampooed my hair, I decided that there might be a new insect bite on my scalp, and even though the scalp isn’t the face, it’s pretty close, right? And then I shivered and thought about insect poop and dying, and shortly after my shower, I perused all the Peace Corps medical information I have, and found not a mention, so I called the volunteer with the sticker and demanded to their voicemail that they search the internet and tell me if there was anything I could do to save myself, or if I was just doomed in thirty years or so. Then I went back to my room and remembered my Moon guidebook, and flipped to the back, where I found a paragraph about Chagas, and learned that only about 2% of the people bitten by assassin bugs actually develop the disease and they also develop a fever within a week or so of being bitten. So then I felt foolish and relieved, and when the volunteers from San Marcos came to visit, they told me that you have a month or more to prevent future death, and also, that the insect I had captured was not, in fact, an assassin bug, but was instead a tree beetle. So I let it go.

The Moon Tonight
My host mom called her grandkids out of the house to look at the moon tonight, and as I generally tend to be the only one constantly startled by the brightness of the night sky, I went out too, understanding that something unusual was going on. It was almost six and the moon was just rising. It was huge and full and golden. I climbed the hill to see it better. As I ate dinner, it reached the clouds that had been above it. It was so bright that it lit them up with pink and purple just like a sunrise. I didn’t know that could happen. Later on, I climbed the hill again, and even though the clouds were thick, they were veined with white from the moon behind them, and the sky was so bright that I could read my watch at 8:00 without using a flashlight.

Walking and Riding and Going to the Beach

I walked to Los Planes yesterday. I was supposed to leave at 8:30, but my counterpart predictably came two hours late, and we didn’t set out until 10:45. Her daughter walked with us, with her black umbrella for the sun. Mine is blue and broken, but I walked with it anyway. My youngest host sister came too, riding a horse with no name and a bad back. We started out on foot paths that eventually led to the road. My counterpart’s daughter flutters around her words so that they sound more like bird than Spanish, and for a long time, I felt like I couldn’t understand anyone. The sun was out, but I was the only one sweating. I had spent the morning drinking water in preparation, and I had a liter with me, but it wouldn’t be enough. Around every corner, we could see new views. La Botija was to our left and mostly hidden, but down on the planes through the dust and haze, we could see Choluteca and the other protected area of Guanacaure. I was glad I didn’t live there. We walked in the shadow of Pantaleon, a steep sided mesa that has always seemed very far when I’ve looked at it from my house. My counterpart planned a picnic on the top, and I thought about how I never wanted to walk this way again. I had no energy. The road swerved downhill steeply at a knee-grinding grade with loose rocks and gravel that I slid on several times. I think I will be remembered as the volunteer who almost fell down a lot. It is a defining feature. We turned onto a deep footpath that led even more dramatically down the side of the mountain. I was surprised when the horse followed us. The path had a width of maybe 8 inches and a depth of a couple feet, and I thought about why horses have such long legs. At around 1:00, we arrived at an integrated farm that I wasn’t expecting. A chasm ran by the house, and my counterpart told me that it was created by a landslide from Hurricane Mitch. The house was beautiful. Years ago, a son carved flowers and a house into the wooden windows and door, which are painted green. The woman who lived there wore an orange blouse that complemented the green, and the light that came in from high windows filled the room. She served homemade rosquillas, which are small, hard doughnut-like crackers that taste a little bit like Cheeze-its. They came on saucers with organic coffee from the farm, and were especially delicious because all I’d eaten so far that day was a bowl of cornflakes. While we snacked, I talked with the farmers, and afterwards, the husband took me on a tour. Where the landslide was, he has planted a variety of fast growing leguminous trees, the leaves and bark of which can be used as pesticides, fertilizer, and chicken feed. Once we were through the woods, we reached a section of coffee shaded by fruit trees and a yucca field with stone terraces to conserve the soil. Next came an organic corn field intercropped with beans and seemingly growing out of pure gravel. This field was terraced too, in a time consuming and painstaking manner that we had kind of learned about in training. We had also learned how hard they are to build, and how most people aren’t willing to do the work. It was extremely impressive. We followed a path down into a wooded lot full of spiny cedros. These trees are popular for furniture and construction. They are frequently harvested illegally, and are becoming rare in Honduras. 1,000 trees were planted 30 years ago as part of a reforestation project. Most of the trees have survived, and the air in the forest was cool and dark. It was hard to return to the sunny uphill path, but we soon ducked into another shaded coffee section and then arrived back at the house.

The rosquillas were good but not terribly filling, so when we were served lunch at about 2:00, I was thankful for about one minute before I realized that the two five-inch strips of reddish hairy thing were not fruit as I had been hoping, but were instead I guess pig skin, although all it consisted of was a thick, soggy layer of fat and bristles. They also came with a bowl of espaghetti, which is a distant and unpopular relative of spaghetti. In Honduras, the sauce is usually ketchup from a bag, mixed with MSG and either mayonnaise or mantequilla (a Honduran cross between sour cream and butter). Although not soggy pig skin, it’s still gross. I forced down the majority of the espaghetti, each bite followed by a rapid bite of tortilla to clear the palate, and after slicing one of the strips into pill-sized cubes of hairy fat with my spoon, I managed to swallow about a quarter of the total before running out of tortilla and telling my counterpart that I was really sorry, I just can’t eat so much when it’s so sunny out. She cleared my plate and I felt ungrateful.

After lunch, the wife took us through the orchard of mangoes and bananas. She pointed out strong smelling leaves and spices, and we found cilantro, ginger, and pimiento, which can be boiled to make tea. A little girl who lived in the house walked with us and fell in love with me. I gave her things to smell and once, when I took a step, I felt her fingers catch in my hair because she had climbed a rock to reach it.

At around four, we left the house, loaded down with probably twenty pounds of bananas, two large squash, a cactus fruit, and a purse full of pimiento leaves. We climbed the steep, torturous trail up to the road, and then continued climbing as the sun went down. We arrived home before it was too completely dark, and after eating the cactus fruit and dinner and drinking two glasses of tea, I went to bed.

My computer died before I finished writing all that, and now it’s been over a week. After that day, I had a day to recover, and then resentfully walked to another village in the same direction but further, although the hike was marginally less terrible. Once I arrived, I was handed a heavy cold tamale and a cup full of Pepsi, and told by the annoying guy who kept talking to me that I was “very sweaty,” to which I responded “yes, that’s clear” and possibly rolled my eyes. I learned upon arrival that the “community meeting” we were attending was actually a Catholic church service. This time we didn’t leave until after the sun had set. We walked back by the light of my counterpart’s cell phone, the stars, and lightening from a far away storm that didn’t reach us until I was at home in bed.

This happened on a Friday, and over the weekend, my host sister-in-law who is a teacher, invited me to a parent-teacher conference on the upcoming Monday. The only catch was that it was an hour-long horse-ride away, and we would be walking because, although I had been asked on a nearly daily basis if I could ride, I had yet to convince anyone that I actually could. I agreed to go, and then finally on Sunday night, I asked the whole family if I could please just ride to school. After much mumbled discussion and being asked twice more if I could really ride, they agreed. In the morning, my host brothers rounded up a horse and a mule, and once they were saddled, we set off. I had the mule, for reasons that I’ll explain later, and I had the interesting experience of remembering long forgotten riding techniques as I bounced down the road. We arrived in the schoolyard and tied the animals underneath some shade trees where they were soon joined by the horses of other attendees. Then the meeting began. It was in one of the two classrooms, and my attention came and went over the two hours that it lasted. I was introduced early on, and then the PTA introduced themselves to me. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the repercussions of the government’s decision to close schools a month early with no warning and a mandate to grade students on their punctuality, commitment to learning, and behavior, as there was no longer time for exams. At the end of the meeting, there was a round of applause for the two teachers. Then we applauded the members of the PTA, and finally, someone called out, “and for the Northamerican!” and I was applauded as well. It was uncomfortable.

Once the meeting broke up, we milled around for a while, and I thought about how I was hungry. I quickly learned my lesson, because it turned out that somehow, someone knew I was coming and had prepared a lunch for me. Unfortunately, the lunch consisted of heaps of rice, espaghetti, and five thick tortillas. This espaghetti was markedly greasier than the previous torturous farm lunch, and both it and the rice tasted somehow more like lighter fluid than anything else I can think of. With the knowledge of my recent pig skin failure fresh in my mind, however, I determined to eat all of it, even though it involved some gagging and much disgustedness. I found that the best method for forcing it down was by exhaling as I rapidly chewed and again followed each bite with a bite of tortilla. Thankfully, there is an interesting tradition in this region of Honduras, wherein the guest is generally seated alone in a separate room from the rest of the family, to eat unaccompanied. For this reason, I eat all my meals in the dining room while my family eats in the kitchen. In a school setting, I ate in one classroom while all the parents and teachers ate in the other one. I finished the whole plate and felt a tiny bit of satisfaction but mostly just sick. Then I hopped on my mule and rode back home. We trotted a lot more on the way back. At one point, the mule farted a lot, and my host sister-in-law said that it was because I weighed so much, but then she told me that it was true, I can ride. She apologized for giving me the mule, because they are less comfortable to ride, it’s just that horses are more nervous and run faster, and the family wanted to be sure I knew what I was doing. So hopefully that means that in the future, I get the horse.

The following day, I went to San Marcos to visit the organic coffee cooperative that sells to Allegro coffee. Oh, if anyone lives near a Whole Foods and reads this, they should go buy Allegro coffee from San Marcos because it’s really good, and the fact that the coffee is organic means that the source of the longest river in Central America has that many fewer chemicals in it. One of the coffee farmers drove me, and I rode with my nearest neighbor who I really like hanging out with. She is on the board of directors and took me on a very short tour of the Cooperative’s headquarters. Wonderfully, the tour included coffee and an interesting explanation of the process of grading the coffee beans. In the afternoon, I ran errands and ate a lot of junk food, and then I and the other volunteers in the area got together and played a very unsatisfying game of Monopoly in Spanish. We were all spending the night in town because we had a regional meeting the next day, and transportation to San Marcos from the surrounding villages is rather inconvenient and unpredictable. In the morning, we headed out for the island town of Amapala, by way of various other larger and hotter southern cities. Amapala is located on Isla de la Tigre, which is off the Pacific coast. It requires a short boat ride, and by the time we arrived, the mix of heat, motion sickness, and junk food made me too sick feeling to do much except sit in the hotel room and play Tetris on my phone. Very sad, I know. I stumbled outside to eat dinner, which, though tasty, did not make me feel any better, and then took my second shower since coming to Honduras and went to bed. The next day was spent in the Honduran equivalent of a conference room/banquet hall. A main focus of the get together was for the new volunteers to have a chance to meet and network with the other volunteers in the region. We also talked about security and health and ate ceviche and paella. It was nice. On the second morning, we headed home. However, the three of us who live in villages around San Marcos got back after the proper buses left, and spent the night in San Marcos again. We cooked dinner together and watched Arrested Development DVDs and played a drawing game.

After so many nights out of my site, I was a little bit worried that I would be restless upon my return. However, it turns out that I’m really happy to be back. The stars here are bright, and last night, even though the moon was only half full, my shadow was crisp against the ground as I stood on the hill behind the house to get phone reception. I think that I’ll soon be working on a survey for community members who are involved in a latrine project, which is great because it’s necessary and useful, and still gives me a good chance to get to know the community better. I also did a community mapping activity with about 35 people, mostly because it’s kind of Peace Corps homework, but it went better than I had anticipated, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. The only bummer is that the moth population in my room has increased exponentially and I’m not sure, but I think they might be eating my clothes.

And to those of you who stuck it out and read all the way to the end of this post, way to go! I imagine you feel a bit like I did after I finished the giant plate of lighter fluid-soaked starch. Sorry, and thanks all the same.

Cara

A Quick Note About My Address:

I have one! It's over in the sidebar. I know it doesn't look real, but apparently it works. It takes letters take longer to arrive than packages, and packages take about two weeks, so send me those. Also, my birthday's kind of coming up. And I really like chocolate and peanut butter.

I Made it to My Site...Unbelievable.

Well, Readers, it appears that my training group beat all the odds and swore in as volunteers last week before heading to our respective homes for the next two years. The day of swearing in, I met my counterpart, an energetic and outspoken woman who somewhat intimidated me with her expectations of who I would be and what we would do together. In the afternoon, after hours of orientation information and speeches, we were bused to the American Embassy were we had a ceremony and cake. Afterwards, we went to Valle de Angeles to celebrate at a pupusa restaurant. Pupusas are kind of like quesadillas, except that the tortillas are much thicker and connected on all sides. To make them, you form something like a bird’s nest out of ground corn, and then in the middle, you put cheese, beans, meat, or whatever you want, I guess...it’s your pupusa. Once it’s filled, you smooth over the top with the corn meal and cook/fry it. Anyway, we ate those, and at the late hour of 9, we headed to our houses for a final night of packing and goodbyes, and if lucky, sleep.

I finished packing at 10:30 or so, which was fortunate because my neighborhood was the first bus stop, which meant that I had to get up at 3:30 or so, hug my host mom goodbye, and drag my ridiculous amount of luggage out into the road. The bus was late, so we didn’t load up until 4:30, but enough with these petty details. Eventually, we picked up everyone and trundled off to Tegucigalpa to meet with our counterparts and follow them home. After a few hours of waiting in a bus station, my counterpart and I headed off for my site. About five hours of mild motion sickness later, we arrived at the intersection of the main road and the dirt road that leads to my village. We waited another hour or so for a ride to bring us the rest of the way. While we mostly sat on stones by the side of the road, I was briefly evacuated while a herd of cattle, guided by a group of cowboys complete with hats, boots, and pistols rode past us. Eventually, my counterpart’s friend arrived with a truck, and we finished the journey to my new house at about 4 pm.

My family here consists of host parents, two sisters, one sister-in-law, two brothers, a 2 year-old granddaughter, and 3 year-old grandson. The house is comfortable, and I live in a brand new little room in the back with a view of a pasture in a valley. It’s a dairy farm, which is awesome cause I likes my milk and cheese. Also, I kind of have solar power. I have a light in my room, but unfortunately, I’m unable to charge any of my gadgets. So I’m still figuring that out, and in the meantime I’ve used 41% of my computer battery typing this post and downloading photos. Good one. Anyway, I have spent the majority of my time in the house being really awkward and eating, but I did have a good conversation with my family last night, so maybe we’re on the road to less awkwardness. My host mom has gotten over her conviction that I don’t speak Spanish or like Honduran food, so that’s progress. For the first couple of months in our communities, Volunteers are supposed to just get to know the community, do some information gathering, familiarize ourselves with local organizations, and not dive into projects. I’ve visited some neighbors, which has been nice because I feel like I’m doing something, but weird because we’ve mostly just sat on porches, consumed sugar, and not had a lot to say. My counterpart is less intimidating these days. She’s really motivated and I think she’ll be great to work with.

The village is beautiful. There is a ridge behind my house that you can climb to reach a view across the mountains and valleys of La Botija and into Nicaragua. The actual village is very spread out and doesn’t really have a center, so I have yet to get a full understanding of its boundaries. Houses are connected more often by foot paths than by the dirt road that winds through the town on its way to other places. This makes for scenic walks and difficult navigation. Yesterday, I climbed up to a place called Miravalle, or basically an overlook. On a sunny day, it’s apparently possible to see Nicaragua, the Pacific Ocean, and El Salvador, but unfortunately, a cloud was blowing in and the view filled with mist. We visited a friend who lives on another dairy farm at the top of the mountain and drank organic coffee and ate fresh oranges, bananas and fruit from a guanajiquil tree.
While I waited for the bus the other day, my host mother found a bunch of small holes in the ground. She said they were from an animal that comes out and bites the cattle, and I asked if it was like a rat, and she said yes. I decided the holes were probably made by a mole or similar class of rodent, but then my host brother put some pine needles down the hole and twirled them around. He got excited and said you could see its legs, so I crouched down and looked, and then a tarantula the size of my hand lunged out. Also, I’m pretty sure that the spiders in my room in Field-Based Training weren’t tarantulas, even though my family said they were. This one was browner and fatter, and more tarantula-like. We continued to wait for the bus, and my host relatives discovered several more holes and teased out three or four more before the bus arrived.

Yesterday, I climbed to the overlook behind my house again because the sky was clearer. I could see a whole new volcano behind the mountains I had seen before. I stayed for a long time taking photos and being pushed around by the wind, and as I walked home, the sun set behind me.

A Touch of Staying

So, I’m not sure how many of you have heard the news, but somewhat predictably, the progression of my training group has again been stymied by the volatile Honduran political situation. Just days away from our swearing-in date and the following dispersal into our sites, the original president, Zelaya, snuck himself back into the country and has since been holed up in the Brazilian Embassy. This has caused a lot of problems, which range from protests and looting to 24-hour curfews (called toques de queda in Spanish, which literally means "a touch of staying"), and even a short but still 1984-ish cessation of telephone service.

I generally feel quite distanced from the reality of the situation. I find myself relating to the curfews more as snow days than as the major life-disrupting disturbances that they have been for many Hondurans. Various host parents were stuck in Tegucigalpa and forced to walk for hours until they were able to get picked up by relatives who broke the curfew to drive out and get them. There have also been runs on gas stations, grocery stores, and banks, but most of these have been in the larger cities. Where I am, about half an hour from the capital, things have been peaceful to the point of boredom, which, considering the alternative, is great, even though I still find myself whining about it.

We heard the first rumors of Zelaya’s return on Monday morning while we were in class. Then our lunch period was extended, and the trainees with internet spread the news that he was back, was in the Brazilian Embassy, and that his supporters were surrounding the building. Our next session was cancelled, because our guest speaker was supposed to be the Peace Corps Country Director, but as the Peace Corps Office and the Brazilian Embassy are in the same neighborhood, she was unable to extricate herself to meet with us. As the afternoon progressed, we learned of a curfew that would begin at 4 pm. Our session ended early, and we waited for the bus driver to arrive. While we settled into the bus seats, a friend asked me to try calling the United States because her phone was giving her a strange message. I tried, and was notified that the number did not exist. Other people tried their phones, and we found that service both outside and within the country had been suspended. The feeling of being so suddenly cut off was disorienting.

When we arrived in our neighborhood, we tried to watch the news, but all the stations here are very politically affiliated, and it was hard to get much information. At around 5:30, a video montage of Honduran scenery accompanied by jolly marimba music cut across the stations and announced the beginning of a news conference to be given by the interim president Micheletti. The conference was mostly incomprehensible to me, but I did learn that the toque de queda had been extended until 7 the next morning. After the marimba music returned to accompany the segue back into regular programming, I went to a friend’s house to get a better translation of the news and speculate about its implications for our future. Then we went to another house in the neighborhood where other trainees were sitting in a carport celebrating one guy’s birthday. After darkness fell, the power was cut off, and we pulled our chairs into the yard to look at the stars. Before I went to bed, I learned that the curfew had been extended from 7 am to 6 pm. I turned off my alarm clock.

Tuesday was the first of two days without classes. Most of the training staff lives in Tegucigalpa, so even though things are peaceful here, it would have been extremely difficult for them to have made it to the center. I spent the two days doing mild but dismayingly exhausting hikes with a friend, and filling the time with visits to other trainees, dominoes, and attempts at cooking. I made some misshapen but edible tortillas, and then, filled with confidence, helped fry the platanos at my house for dinner. Without even knowing that I was responsible, my six year-old host sister refused to eat them, complaining that they were too hard, and asking who had cooked them. My host grandmother tried to make excuses for me, saying that they just weren’t ripe enough to begin with, but she wasn’t kidding anyone.

On Thursday, we had a shortened day of training, the entirety of which was concentrated on learning the Honduran National Anthem. We left the center at three, and a group of us went directly to Valle de Angeles, a nearby town, to eat pupusas and be away from our houses.

For those of you who are wondering, our swearing-in date has again been postponed. The new date is set for next Wednesday, with the goal of heading out to our sites the following morning. Don’t tell Honduras, though, cause it will probably do something to throw another wrench in our plans.

Tomorrow, classes resume at the normal time, which means that I have to get up at 5. It also means that I have a language placement interview at 7:30, which I’m pretty sure is the worst time ever to have an interview, especially in a different language, so wish me luck, and I’m off to bed.

P.S. I wrote all that on Thursday night, and have a few updates. First of all, I had my interview, and it was a bad time, but I still managed to advance to the level of Intermediate High on the Foreign Service Institute or something scale. Congratulations. Things seem to be settling down a little, or, perhaps more accurately, stewing. We´ll see what the next week brings. We had a 6 pm to 6 am curfew last night, but it was probably because it´s a weekend.

I wish you all well!
Peace,
Cara

Site Announcement

Hi all,
Just wanted to drop a quick line about my site, where I will be moving next week. I learned more details on Thursday, and everything is official now. I´m going to be living in a tiny town near the Sierra de la Botija (Mountain of the Hidden Treasure...or something) Protected Area. It´s in the deep south right by the border with Nicaragua. It sounds like I´ll be pretty busy when I finally get settled in. My work areas include working with small scale farmers and a women´s group, promoting organic fertilizers and compost, some work with chickens and pigs, a latrine project, micro-watershed management which includes all kinds of things, and possibly working with a health center. All this is in the future though. First I have two months in my site where I´m supposed to run community diagnostics and get to know people.

I´m not going to have electricity, which doesn´t bode well for regular blog postings. If you don´t hear from me for a while, it´s not because I´ve forgotten you. It also doesn´t mean I don´t want to hear from you, even if you think things are really boring where you are. With twelve hours of darkness a day and without a lot of Spanish fluency, I´m sure to be quite acquainted with boredom. Write away, and when I do someday check my email, it will be like Christmas morning.

Cara

FBT Wrap-Up

Well, I can’t believe it, but we’re about to finish Field Based Training. Our swearing-in date isn’t for a while yet, but we’ll be spending the last two weeks in our first training site closer to the capital. I started this entry a couple weeks ago, but due to an unexpected illness, I wasn’t able to access the internet last week, so this update’s going to cover a lot of territory, inefficiently as always. I guess I’ll just dive right in:

A few weeks ago, we were learning how to make insect collections, and I received a plastic purse to catch a bug in. I spent a few minutes unsuccessfully swiping at flying ants, and then a friend and I took a walk behind the house we’ve been having classes in. We found a log and decided to flip it over, and there we discovered two toads and a tarantula! So of course we had to catch the spider because we were making an insect collection after all, and after much jumping and some shrieking and a little prodding with a stick, I pushed it into the purse and triumphantly carried it back to class. The next step was to euthanize it with nail polish remover, which seemed kind of mean, and then we realized that tarantulas are kind of too juicy to pin, and later on I learned that technically, they aren’t even insects, they’re arthropods, which are apparently different, so after much discussion, we returned it to its stump and ended up not killing anything.

Speaking of arthropods, I went back to the cave with another group of trainees and a few host siblings including my host sister. I was almost in charge of finding the way, but we ended up finding the guide we had the time before, which was a good thing, because in the last two weeks, all the fields around the path had been burned and I would have been lost. The hike took a lot less time because the group was smaller and didn’t contain any four year-olds. As I slithered through the entrance, I realized that my headlamp batteries were dying and I could only see about two feet in front of me. Very unfortunate. Anyway, I was one of the first people in the cave, and as I waited for everyone to squeeze through the first few chambers, one of the Honduran girls screamed beside me that there was a snake. I looked at it with my dying light and at first I thought it was just a bat, but then it unwound a bit and did indeed become a long brown snake with a boa-like head. The biologist in our group made it into the chamber and deemed it not poisonous, although this didn’t really reassure any of the Hondurans. Then one of the guides came with a machete and we had to convince him not to kill it, which took some doing. We continued into the cave, walking more slowly this time and finding, along with the snake and hundreds of bats, some large crab-like arthropods, which were neither spiders, nor insects, just in case you wanted to know. We also learned that if you tap on stalactites, they resonate like bells. After spending about an hour in the caves, we were presented with two options for reaching the waterfall: easy or fun. We opted for the fun route, which lived up to the hype and entailed walking and climbing up the fern and moss covered stones and streambed below the falls until we reached the pool.

A few days before the cave and waterfall expedition, the whole PAM group went on a camping trip to a small village named Rio Negro, which is only about 40 minutes from our training site, but way up a mountain. We visited a Volunteer who is expanding the eco-tourism industry there. The first thing that I and five other trainees did was teach a class on biological classification to some tour guides in training. I was responsible for talking about the Plant Kingdom, which apparently is what it’s called, and which I stayed up quite late reading about the night before, because as it turns out, I know very little about biological classification, and even less about tropical cloud forest ecology. Luckily, I augmented my scanty knowledge with some colorful illustrations of epiphytes, and no one asked any questions. Then I shared my almost-insect pinning skills with everyone and called it a day. During the presentation, other trainees pitched our tents in the yard of one of the more experienced guides. Just when I went to bed, some other PAMers came by our tent and talked us into going on a night hike to look for jaguarondi, which they said were like jaguars, but smaller. After some confusion, I left my headlamp in the tent because the guide said something about how they weren’t allowed, but that turned out to be false. I wasn’t the only one who had been confused, however, so we staggered ourselves between those with lights and tried to keep up. The jaguarondi search also turned out to be a misunderstanding. What we actually did was walk a ways into the forest, and then leave someone, and walk a little further and leave someone else, until we were all spread out alone in the dark along the trail. This was fine. We got to see lightening bugs, but after half an hour, the charm wore very thin. Finally, the group returned and we picked up more people on the way back. The highlight of the hike came when someone in front of me took one step off the trail and fell wordlessly into a ravine so deep he had to jump up so we could reach his hands to pull him out. Thankfully he wasn’t hurt, which was especially fortunate because we started laughing about immediately after it happened. The hike continued until everyone was collected and we all went to bed. In the morning, we hiked with the new tour guides up into the Protected Area. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, the Honduran government instructed the people to cut down the forests in order to produce better coffee. There are now a handful of 400 year-old trees left, but the majority of the hike was through younger trees. Nevertheless, the walk was green and beautiful. The grand finale was a giant waterfall which provides the water for four towns further down the river. Its spray filled the air, and we played at its base for a long time.

The day after returning from Rio Negro was deemed “Cultural Day” on our schedules. Each Spanish class had to prepare a presentation about something cultural to give in front of what we thought would be our assembled host families, but what also turned out to be the students and teachers of the local elementary school. The four of us in my Spanish class toyed around with talking about Ultimate Frisbee or juggling, but while we were in Rio Negro, my three fellow classmates decided that our cultural contribution would be line dancing. The dance we were to perform was called “Slappin’ Leather” and involved a lot of counting and also a lot of coordinated movement, neither of which are my fortes. After demonstrating these deficiencies over and over, my classmates decided that if I couldn’t get it together, I could just explain the concept of line dancing and sit down. However, when I got back to my house that night, my host sister and I practiced for probably two hours until we could do the whole thing without messing up. In the morning, we had a quick rehearsal, and I shocked everyone with my immense improvement. Then the show got underway with a surprise performance by the fourth grade class. They filed onto the outdoor stage wearing matching white colonial dresses and suits decorated with green and red ribbons. The girls had wreaths of flowers in their hair, and the boys wore straw hats. Then some music started and they wove in perfect patterns like dolls. They performed three different dances, and the last one was the Punta, a traditional dance from the north coast of Honduras, which has a complicated rhythm and to the uncultured eye generally consists of shaking your butt a lot. I had the great fortune of being invited to dance by one of the boys, and since I could see no way of getting out of it, I followed him on stage and then just kind of stood there and asked a couple times for him to tell me what to do, without answer. So that was pretty mortifying. I did try a couple half-hearted hip twists, but I wasn’t fooling anyone, and when the dance ended, I went and sat with my host family in the back of the audience. A class of trainees demonstrated four-square, with limited success. I don’t see it catching on. Then another class showed some powerpoints on barn hexes and the temperate climate, but the outdoor lighting unfortunately wasn’t conducive to projection. When my class went, and I mostly kept it together, and after demonstrating the steps, we convinced maybe 40 onlookers to come onstage and participate. Together we danced to the entirety of the “Boot-Scoot Boogie,” and afterwards various Hondurans expressed an interest in learning more. Score 1 for line dancing. The morning was full of other presentations, and for lunch, each trainee and their host family was supposed to prepare a typical dish. My host mom, knowledgeable as she was about my cooking abilities, elected to cook our tamales (which, by the way do exist and are different from both tamalitos and the tamalitos + meat, or “mantuca,” that I wrote about in my last post) on the day that I was away in Rio Negro. Score 1 for edible food.

Other class/community activities of the last couple weeks have included returning to the fourth grade class where I am now a superstar and teaching a marginal class about forest appreciation, going to Tegucigalpa for a morning to officially receive Honduran residency, participating in a 4-hour HIV/AIDS prevention workshop with a class of high schoolers, and watching the disappointing Honduras vs. Mexico soccer game while eating a sickening combination of fried plantain chips with fresh salsa, mantuca, popcorn, and a strawberry birthday cake. I also spent the weekend, Monday, and part of Tuesday sequestered in my room with a probably viral infection-induced fever, headache, and dizziness that have yet to fully quit my system.

On the insect front, I just stepped on a giant cockroach that jumped out at me from my suitcase. While sitting here at my desk, I have also squished a spider, several speedy mites, a big red biting ant, and I batted away a giant black flying beetle. My recent aggression toward the insect realm comes on the heels of three bites on my hands that incited allergic reactions, a hidden spider in my shoe that I first thought was gravel but later found squished across my sock, a big hairy tarantula (or maybe banana spider) that my host mom swept off my wall a few nights ago, and a biting ant infestation last night during a prolonged electricity outage.

And speaking of electricity outages, today I received some concrete hints about the site where I will be living for two years. It’s kind of the last place I expected, and I’m having some trouble getting my head around it, but from what I and other trainees have pieced together, it sounds like I’m headed to the southernmost department of the country. Supposedly the climate is similar to that of Tegucigalpa, but all anyone ever says about the south is that it’s really hot…like desert-ishly hot, so I’ll believe it when I feel it. I will be the first volunteer in my town of 500 people sans electricity, and it sounds like I will be involved in sustainable agriculture, micro-watershed management, environmental education, building latrines, and doing some sort of work with a women’s group. So those are a lot of directions.

Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired, so best wishes to all!
Cara

Three Weeks In

While my last post was painfully long, it actually only covered the first two weeks of my time here. I’ll try to edit better on this next one.

I suppose I will begin by writing about the problem with a roof that looks like stars. As one might predict, the ability to see sunlight through one’s ceiling says a lot about said ceiling’s integrity. Sadly, I have found that when it rains hard outside, it also rains everywhere inside. Not hard, but noticeably and indiscriminately. It’s kind of refreshing, but only if you’re trying to be really optimistic. For the less upbeat, it is a source of perturbance, and for my host family, it is a source of stress, especially with the discovery of a major leak above my bed and another above my bookshelf. My host mother and sister have gone to great lengths to protect my belongings. First my books were moved and now reside under a towel, and then my bed was shifted to the other side of the room. A few days later, they replaced the problem tiles. Thankfully, my room is now as dry as everywhere else in the house when it rains, a thought that is especially nice right now as the sky is full of thunder and wind.

Roof deficiencies aside, I’m extremely glad to be living where I am. Now that we’re not such strangers, I am really thankful to be living with a small, quiet family. I like my host sister a lot, and as my Spanish comprehension (if not speaking) ability improves, we’ve been able to have some less superficial talks. In other domestic news, my cooking contributions remain limited to burning the plantains every week or so. I have also discovered that washing laundry on a rock is extremely cathartic, which is a good thing because we keep going on field trips and I keep getting covered in dirt. There is also a new addition to the household. A few days ago, my family adopted an abandoned kitten. It’s orange and white and really young. To feed it, we put milk in a plastic baggie with a hole in one corner, and mostly it just goes everywhere except the kitten’s mouth.

Every day here is packed, and it’s hard to narrow down highlights. For the rest of this post, I think I’ll just write about unconnected events. Sorry for the absence of segues.

On our first Saturday in town, the chief of police had organized a Trainees versus Townspeople soccer game in the afternoon. I showed up to find that not only did the other team have full uniforms, but they had brought uniforms for us. They also stacked our team a bit with players from a neighboring town, which was merciful because surprisingly few of us had played before, and only one trainee had cleats, which were especially necessary because it had just rained and the field was covered in mud. With the help of our Honduran goalie and offensive line, we managed to win the first half, but then our goalie had to go, and we ended up losing the game.

A common project for volunteers is to make more efficient and healthier stoves, or fogones, with the women in their communities. The most common fogones here are up on tables covered in adobe. Then bricks are stacked and cemented with more adobe to form a little box with one open side to put wood into. On top of the box is a plancha, or cooking surface, which is generally comprised of 1.5 foot-ish diameter metal circle. Even in houses that have electric stoves, fogones are used frequently because firewood is less expensive than electricity, and because people prefer the taste of food cooked on them. Unfortunately, they are often very inefficient, which encourages more deforestation, and many designs allow the smoke to escape into the house where it causes respiratory diseases in women and children. A couple of volunteers visited to show us the ropes of stove construction, and we split up into groups to build stoves in three different houses here. First we made adobe from clay and horse manure. Then we packed it around some bricks and stones on top of a base. The design we were using included an oven, and then on the second level was the space for wood, and on top of that was the plancha. Unfortunately, the woman who lived in the house had some strong ideas about how the construction should go, and we aren’t sure that it ended up being as efficient as it could have been, but we haven’t received any reports of it caving in or anything, so I guess we’ll count it as a success.

Other general class activities have included field trips to an integrated, organic farm, a coffee farm, and a volunteer’s site, teaching a class of fourth graders about the water cycle, and working with some high school students to make a simple instrument for measuring the slope of hills and practicing some techniques used for soil conservation. While we built a small terrace together, one of the students flipped over a rock to find the first scorpion I’ve ever seen. The scorpions here aren’t deadly, but they still pack quite a punch and are detested by the Hondurans. The student quickly dispatched it with a stone. We also spent a morning working with local farmers. My farmer’s area was an uncommonly flat field way, way up a mountain. I managed to sweat off all my sunscreen by the time we arrived, and then we spent the morning harvesting red beans and hanging them on a fence to dry. At noon, we walked down a different, steeper path with views of the whole valley and beautiful stone outcrops.

The most lamentable difference between Honduras and the Dominican Republic is the absence of fresh fruit and vegetables. My meals here generally consist of some combination of tortillas, beans, cheese, eggs, extremely tough meat or fried bologna, and the occasional burnt plantain. Sometimes I’ll get a slice of avocado or tomato, but fresh produce has by and large disappeared from my diet. One happy supplement has come in the form of chocobananas (frozen bananas dipped in chocolate and impaled on popsicle sticks). A woman sells them from her house, which is between my house and the training center. They cost 1 Lempira, or about 5 cents, and I’m up to about two a day.

Another local food is the tamalito. They are basically like tamales, but they aren’t stuffed with anything, and they’re kind of sweet because people add sugar to the mixture of milk, oil, tomato sauce, and corn. Then the batter is spooned into corn husks, folded, and placed in a vat of boiling water to cook until solid. Last weekend, I got to “help” assemble a batch at a neighbor’s house. I’ve been invited back this Sunday, when we will try to add some beans to the middles. When they’re made with a filling and without the sugar, they’re called something different. An interesting difference between stuffed tamalitos and tamales I’ve had in the US is that the chicken ones here still contain the bone, something that came as quite a surprise the first time I stuck my fork into one.

Last weekend was full of adventures. In addition to assembling tamalitos, I went spelunking and swam in a pool under a 30 foot waterfall. All of this came about because the family of another trainee offered to take her to some caves. Then she invited some more trainees, and her family invited some more family, and by the time we finally left, there were six trainees and nineteen Hondurans. Only one person had been to the caves before, and we didn’t really know what to expect. After a ten minute bus ride, we stopped on the side of the paved street and commenced walking down an eroded dirt road. I was expecting a short hike, because the trainee who had invited me had said that her family drives the ten minute walk to church, and she couldn’t imagine them hiking anywhere. However, the road took us first down a hill and then across a river, where a machete-wielding guide met us and led us up a couple more hills until the trail disappeared and he began hacking a path through the undergrowth. After two hours, we arrived at a copse of stones and the small mouth of the cave. Only about half of the group members had light sources. On my way out the door, my host sister had wisely suggested that I bring my headlamp, so I was set, but for those who didn’t have wise host sisters, some of the boys lit sticks and sap and carried them underground. The warm light contrasted anachronistically with the LED displays of cell phones, and the smoke smelled like myrrh. One by one, we crawled and slid through the cave mouth. I was one of the last to enter, and the whole thing was kind of a test for me, because as some of you may recall, I have become claustrophobic in my old age, and haven’t entered an enclosed space since I had a panic attack in the Pyramids. The cave started with a series of successively larger chambers. The first two had to be belly crawled through, and then there was a third that I could crouch through, and finally, once I ducked through a narrow passageway, the cave opened up into a cylindrical room that all twenty-five of us could fit in. The ceiling and floor were populated with stalactites and stalagmites, and over on the edges of the cave, they had fused together to create pillars. Once we had all reached this space, we continued walking in a single-file line over fallen stones and bat guano until, about half an hour and one precarious climb later, we reached a dead end. The torches had been put out because of the smoke, and we walked back with blue shadows and bats flying by our heads. Once we were out of the cave, we walked back to the river we had crossed earlier, and from there, we took a different route that led us to the waterfall. We arrived by a steep trail that ended at a pool edged by moss, stones, and various tropical plants. We went swimming in the cool water, ate packed lunches, and walked back to the paved road all wet.

Well, it seems that I failed to edit better. If anything, this post is longer than the last one. Oops. One final note--some of you may have noticed that I have posted my mailing address. I don’t know where my site will be or how long mail usually takes to get to Honduras, but whatever you send to the posted address should make it to me eventually, so write your little hearts out, or just send chocolate. As ever, comments on this blog are also deeply appreciated. I would also like to send a shout out to Mrs. Torrence’s third and fourth grade class. I heard you guys have been keeping tabs on me, so “Hola,” and I’ll try to cut down on the run-on sentences! If your class has any questions, feel free to ask away. The internet situation here is a bit sketchy, but I’ll try my best to answer in a timely manner.

Ok, Peace Out.