obama in spanish is still obama

8 November 2008
Hey, chochachos! This past week has been like 10,000 Christmases…a jillion birthdays…10 katrillion December 19ths…it’s like my faith in the intelligence of my country has been restored. It’s like I was hoping wildly my parents would get me that intelligent, good-hearted pony for Christmas, knowing that they probably wouldn’t because I’d always asked for a pony before and been disappointed…and then, lo and behold, I wake up on Christmas morning and there is just the sassiest of ponies waitin’ in the living room, all prancing around and pointedly not crapping on the carpet. Thanks, guys. I got up early on Tuesday and headed over to the Fondo Cristiano office, where I promptly made a huge “VIVA OBAMA” sign in red, white, and blue. I went home and tied it to the door of our porch. The folks back home I had recently talked to seemed optimistic our man would win, but I’m just not as inundated with polls and blogs and interviews as you guys and I didn’t really have a good idea of what was gonna happen. Parked in front of CNN en espanol all day, I watched the crowd in Grant Park and wished like the dang old dickens I was still there, celebrating with all my friends, but I could feel the awesomeness just by watching it (Samir, I totally freaking saw you! They zoomed in on you. You were chewing gum. What flavor was it?). Besides, I was havin’ a pretty crazy party on my own…I sat up in one of the comedors (shacks that sell food) and ate three baleadas (hey, it was a special night) and drank some tamarindo juice (I’m not sure if they’re fruit or what, but they look like rubbery peanuts and people here boil them and make them into delicious juice that sort of tastes like apples). However, the folks eating there were more interested in watching soap operas than history unfold, so I went home and sat alone in the living room, watching the magic of democracy in the hands of the wise while sucking down more tamarindo juice from a bag, tallying up each state and beaming until my facebones hurt and my eyeballs sweated. All this week people have been coming up to me and sayin “VIVA OBAMA!” and patting me on the back enthusiastically. Anyway, all I can say is we freaking did it and THANK YOU. Thank you for voting…thank you to everyone who worked on Obama’s campaign…twerpy idealists or not, this collective decision is the best one we’ve made in a long time and I am so proud of our country I could barf. Yay America!

Everything else is awesome right now, too. My program director came and visited on Tuesday, and we had a meeting with my counterparts. She also brought me a butt-load of baseball gear, so I’ve started throwing the ball around (is that a phrase applicable to baseball or football or both?!?) with the little guys who live near me, namely Eliezer, Anner, Erlin, Eric, Elder, and Ander. My old-lady neighbor Gila also joined in a bit, which was hilarious…she marches out there in her matching blouse-and-skirt outfit that all elderly women here seem to own, and asks me for a glove! She’s got a pretty good arm on her, too. The only problem is that now all this kids know I have baseball gear, so they literally never leave my house. When I wake up in the morning, there they are, waiting outside the porch gate. When I cook dinner, they press their faces against the kitchen window and watch. When I leave the house, they pour out of bushes and drop from trees, inquiring if now would be an okay time to play, even though it’s 8:00am and they’re supposed to be in school. It’s kind of hilarious, actually. But I had a meeting at school this past week and got all the kids signed up, and we’re going to start having official practices once they’re let out for the “summer,” which should be in a week or two.

My program director informed me it’s time to stop drinking coffee on people’s porches all day and be “pro-active,” so I guess vacation time is over. I met with the doctor at the health center, and he’s really awesome. They’ve always reserved the first and last Friday of the month for the pregnant women of Alubarén and the surrounding aldeas, but it’s just for a medical check up and sometimes a health talk. So I told him I wanted to make it more like a club, and he said go for it. I made a big poster that says “Embarazada?” (pregnant) and then under it a logo I designed, with three hella pregnant ladies all hugging and looking happy with “Club de Mujeres Embarazadas” written around it. We had our first meeting this Friday, and despite only 5 of them showed up, it went pretty well. We had a dinamica (basically an ice-breaker game), snacks, and talked about our interests, our pregnancies (I stuffed a soccer ball under my shirt to fit in), and anything else. Then I gave a health talk on nutrition during pregnancy, which involved them pinning pictures of carrots and tomatoes and beans to a giant sheet of paper, among other things. It’s sad because four of them were under 20, and one was only 15. Teenage pregnancy is a huge problem here, and next school year (which starts in February) I’m going to do a lot of work with the kids to try to prevent this. Maybe iron underwear, with padlocks and stuff?

I visited a preschool in a village near here called Jicaro on Wednesday. I went with my neighbor Angie, who has been the preschool teacher there for four years…even though she’s only FOURTEEN. She walks there for 45 minutes every day, teaches for two hours, then turns around and comes back in time for afternoon high school (there are two shifts). She looks and acts like she’s 18—I thought she was kidding and refused to believe she was 14 until a friend corroborated it. The kindergarten was pretty sad…one little room that smelled like mouse piss, with four wobbly benches that looked like the preschoolers themselves might have made them, a crummy chalkboard, and a table with a cardboard box that held some crayons, scissors, and a bottle of glue. This preschool is a state-funded one, unlike the others I’ll be working with, which are funded by the NGO Christian Children’s Fund. Today, the kids were each given two sheets of paper, a blue and a black crayon, and scissors. Sitting on the floor and using the benches as desks, they all colored the fish tank on the first page blue, then colored all the fish on the next page black. Then cut the fish out and glued them into the tank. I flipped through the curriculum book that Angie has, and it’s pretty extensive—full lesson plans for each day of the school year, all of which are accompanied by a CD, with songs and stories for the kids! I asked Angie about it, but she said she keeps the battery-powered CD player at home so it doesn’t get stolen, and doesn’t have all the CDs. As usual, basic infrastructure in place but no one using it. She started the day by asking all the kids about different tastes (salty vs. sweet, etc), which I noticed was part of the first unit—they should be in the last one, since it’s almost the end of the year. Then she did the fish thing, which was from the third unit or something…but the fish activity was supposed to be prefaced by a whole day focused on counting to 10 (that’s how many fish there were) and caring for animals. She didn’t mention either of those aspects once. I asked her later about it—about why she wasn’t following the state-supplied curriculum the way it was meant to be used—and she just looked embarrassed and said I know, I know. The good thing is I can include her in the workshops I’ll be giving the preschool teachers, but the bad thing is I won’t be starting those until next January or February.

Peace Corps informed me I may not live next to a river (there go all my Chris Farley jokes I was going to make, damn it), but it’s okay, I ain’t buggin. I took some kids for a walk today and was chatting with a dude Nelo who owns a pulperia, and he randomly informed me the cute house across the street was empty. I went down the road to the owner’s house, and she said I can have it if I want it. It’s got a big backyard with all kinds of trees, and plants…even roses! The house is small but nice, and very secure—bars on the windows and everything. It’s got a latrine out back, as well as a shower (well, a tube coming out of the wall, but it’s still a shower!) and a pila. It’s got neighbors next door, and I saw a snake slithering around in the backyard! I plan on capturing it later and making it my guard-snake, Scumbag. The only downside is, aside from a hammock which she said I can use, the house doesn’t have any furniture, so I’ll have to fork over the dough to buy a bed and stuff. Balls. Maybe I can train Scumbag to also be a thief and go steal me a mattress from somewhere…

So I got a bunch of mail the other day! Proof the mail system actually works up here, which I admittedly doubted before—hats off to Wilma and her babies-as-carrots calendar. I received a box from my folks, filled with sexy 5th-grade-teacher-esque collared, sleeveless blouses and enough deodorant to last my sweaty self about two years. I also got a bunch of letters and another box from Kayleigh, filled with love and rainbows and metaphorical pinecones…thanks dudes. For serious. For any interested parties, my address here is:
Hayley Kercher
Alubarén, F.M.
11310
Honduras
I know I keep mentioning that…but I’m just saving you guys energy from excessive scrolling. SO THOUGHTFUL. SO KIND. SO DESERVING OF LETTERS.

Guess that’s it…though I want to mention that one of, if not the, best things about Honduras is that at any given moment I am almost guaranteed to hear either “El Choffer” by Mexican ranchera artist Vicente Fernandez, “My Heart Will Go Own,” by Canadian non-ranchera artist Celine Dion, or…are you ready, Northwestern Marching Band kids?....TARZAN BOY. Yes, it seems that Baltimora is enjoying a healthy popularity wave on certain radio stations down here. Nothing makes me day than walking down a dirt road in the middle of a random mountain in Honduras, passing a house with a radio blaring and suddenly having vivid mental images of Gabe, Harrison, Josh, Tom, and/or Tim shaking their butts while I beat my bass drum. Words can’t describe.

In other news, I totally fell and skinned my knee like a child the other day while playing “bate,” this local game kids play that’s like a combo of kick-ball and baseball. The good thing was I was able to use the surgical scrum in my PC medical kit, which was just as exciting as it sounds.
Paz,
Hayley
p.s. VIVA OBAMA!