i reinvented the sandwich yesterday

Gabe and Igor at the swimmin' hole

One of my colgate kids happily avoiding a lifetime of oral health problems

i brushed my teeth five times that day...these are my kindergarteners in town

he needs two hands

little ali

freaking claw-spiders, all over my house...this is held by alex, the Brave Neighbor

view of alubaren from my sittin' hill...

douglas checking kaiser for fleas

do it igor!

bat dog! when the wind hits just right...

wrasslin with my dude

alison, contemplating

igor sittin in the river.

me and douglas, sittin on my front steps

the kids with alison's birthday surprise, a clifford pinata i imported all the way from tegus

alison and her uncle alex (nely's brother)

patrick and igor at da swimmin hole

please note douglas is too rude to end his phone conversation for the picture (featuring nely and noel)

noel, nely's son

hermanos! kaiser loves to give igor kisses on the face. they're very close.

this picture is hilarious.

one of my aldea kids

the man loves mangos.

reading a book (thanks Mrs. Kaufmann!) to my preschoolers

the whole gang, at alison's 5th birthday

on our way to the regional championship!

17 May 2009
Hey, chochachos! Man do you guys ever get those zits in your armpits that hurt like the dickens? I totally got one of those things goin’ on right now. Armpit zits = not cool. I bet if a famous journalist was doing a story on Things That Ain’t Cool he or she would totally fly down to Honduras to interview me, cause of my armpit situation I got right now. The front-page picture could be a shot of me showing the camera the red bump and wincing painfully. If you guys know any famous journalists, send them down here. I got a story for em!

Other than that, though, I’m pretty good. I got just ALL kinds of lonely last night, I don’t know why…I was just lying in my hammock, drinkin’ some crazy-delicious cactus tea (thanks, Mimi!!) and thinking about stuff when I just started feeling all lonesome. It’s not that I miss the States…I don’t. Really. Yes, I miss the ample and toasty sandwiches that are available at all hours of the day due to the natural abundance of supermarkets and toasters. And I miss delicious frosty beers of the fancy variety, all on tap, all served to me in a pint glass. And I miss pretzels. And chocolate. And dried fruit. And Swedish Fish (thanks again, Mimi!!). But those are all a) related to things I put in my mouth and chew up, and b) of trivial importance (after all, I can and will stuff myself when I get back to the land of delicious treats in September 2010). But I don’t miss the cars, and the stress, and the greed, and the self-centeredness, and the obsession with money and Things, and the constant need to be entertained, and all that stuff. I could live here in my little yellow concrete and adobe bungalow forever (can I call it a bungalow? I’m unsure of the actual definition of that term, but I’m rather fond of it, so whatever it’s a dang old bungalow as far as I’m concerned). I love my latrine and pila and bath barrel outside, and I love my mango groves all over the place, and my swimming holes, and hills all around my house, and my chirpy birds and blinky bugs (more on that in a bit) and all the little kids that own this town and are my most constant companions. And I love my dog. But even though my neighbors have become my family and the kids my gang of friends and drinking a cup of coffee in a plastic chair my idea of a bitchin’ Friday night…sometimes I just get hells of lonely for all you guys back home. I made a big poster the other day; glued like 15 pictures I’d brought from home glued to a sheet of poster board, colored it all up with crayons, framed it with sticks and hung it from the ceiling with hemp. So it’s not that I’m homesick, per se…just peoplesick. I think part of it has to do with the fact I don’t have much to do in the evenings here—after about 7 or 8:00pm, when the neighbors have turned in and I’ve eaten my dinner, I just lay in my hammock and pet Igor and think about stuff…you’d be surprised, with all one’s reading materials exhausted and no TV or iPod, you get really good at just thinking and thinking and thinking, flowing from one topic to another in your head without direction. It’s sort of like a silent conversation between myself and myself. I’m not crazy, though…just introspective. There’s a difference.

I can’t complain though. A week ago, two fellow volunteers Gabe and Patrick came and visited me in my site, which was excellent fun. David, the volunteer who lives in the next pueblo over (like an hour walking), came over too and the four of us had a great old time, eating tasty foods and speaking in English and having adventures. With my neighbors Nely and the kids, we hiked out to these awesome little swimming holes carved out of the rocks by the water, surrounded by little caves and big trees. It was very beautiful, and the rust-colored water (due to the rotting leaves at the bottom of the pools) was delightfully cold. The next day just me and the gringos hiked back out and swam some more, ate a lot of guacamole and tortillas, and then had a crazy two-hour hike back home “as the crow flies,” as in tramping up and down vertical hills, weaving (very carefully) through farmer’s crops and stoppin’ at what I like to call Mango Town, where a thick carpet of freshly-fallen mangos cover the dirt under the canopy of green. (You gotta be sure and only eat the ones without worms, though…unless you’re into worms. Igor, for example, is not picky). Then we scrambled up to my favorite look-out spot, an isolated little perch on top of a rocky hill that gives you a view of the whole town. Later we made spaghetti, and each drank 4-5 “purple drinks,” which are these awesome popsicles in plastic tube-shaped bags (think short, fat, Otter Pops) that my neighbor, Nelo, sells as beverages. Drinking liquid popsicles = making a lot of my childhood dreams a reality.

It’s the rainy season now! About two weeks ago, David came over to work on a project we were doing together. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, just like any other….when SUDDENLY, the sky turned chunky gray and the thunder boomed and it just RAINED like the dang old dickens, all that day, all night, and most of the morning the next day (David spent the night on my floor on my extra mattress, which provided a lot of fodder for my gossip-hungry neighbors). Ever since, it’s rained every other day or so. My backyard, which used to be pure dirt except for the small patches where I dumped pails of water, has transformed itself entirely. It looks like someone ate a bunch of green Skittles and then just barfed all over the place. EVERYTHING is growing! Everything is green! Everything is flowering! It’s crazy. I have a lawn where I used to have dust. Random seeds I’d thrown around casually have sprouted, resulting in a small watermelon patch by my front door (from the time I was too lazy to throw the seeds and rinds away properly) and a bean patch by my water spigot (from when I sit and sort through the good and bad beans for dinner). And my cantaloupe patch has taken over about half my yard now. I can’t get over how green and leafy and wonderful everything has become. At night, sometimes I just go and sit out in the darkness, and enjoy the blinky-ness of the night. Fireflies are crazy this time of year; the air is so thick with them it looks like a psychedelic light show. The lightening flashing over the mountains adds a distant layer to the blinky-blink. The waaaaap-waaaaap of the toads and the laser-gun frogs are like an auditory blinky-blink…and, since the lights usually go out if it’s raining, the flickering candles from people’s homes makes it all the blinkier. Basically I’m just delighted that we’re finally ending the dry season and beginning the wet season…we’ll have rain now until November. I get water in my pila almost every day now, and the torrential downpours make running and screaming in the water a neighborhood activity. Dang but man I love this rain!

My butt is sweaty…I’m gonna go take a bath. Hooray!
Love
Hayley

pig flu is just a conspiracy

26 April 2009
Hey, chochachos! Dudes I just killed a tiny baby scorpion in my dang house! I was sweeping (yes I am domesticated in that sort of way) in the kitchen and I saw this little critter go scuttling across the floor. I bent down to see what the tiny thing was and discovered it was an itty-bitty arachnid of the stingy variety. I quickly shanked it to death with my broom and swept it outside, and then ran over to announce to Nely what I’d done. Of course she and Tina were duly impressed and then Tina became quite concerned, telling me the mom scorpion was surely nearby, giving birth (?) to many more tiny scorpions. Either way, I have to find her, but I’m not really interested in hosting a scorpion day-care center so she should probably find another place to birth her young (though obviously Tina is mistaken about the live-birth thing…everyone and their momma knows scorpions are marsupials).

Well, last Saturday was the big regional baseball tournament, hosted with honor by non other than Alubarén. Originally, both Reitoca and Pespire (another town in the south) were supposed to come and play, but Pespire backed out at the last minute—their volunteer said he couldn’t wrassle up enough kids to play. Very disappointing for us, since the rules state that in order to win the tournament you MUST have two wins under your belt—aka we would have to play Reitoca twice, potentially three times in the event of a tie. Saturday morning came, and the 15 kids I’d selected to play, plus all the others that are part of the team but not old enough/too sucky/too bratty to be picked for the tournament team, showed up at my doorstep as planned at 8:00am. In their little yellow jerseys with marching black baseball pants and yellow caps, they looked very professional. We hoisted the Panteras flag that John (volunteer before me; he started the team from scratch!) made by hand and marched proudly through town up to the baseball field. The kids, wanted to make a good impression on Reitoca, who were beginning to arrive, quickly arranged themselves in two neat lines in the center of the field and began to play catch. Eventually, my program direction Ronaldo and his wife showed up, with a member of the National Baseball Federation of Honduras (yes they exist!) who would act as the main umpire. They dragged a cooler of water they’d brought for the kids over, we marked up the field with ashes the kid’s had brought in bags from their moms’ woodstoves, and got all the kids together to sing the national anthem and give a couple short speeches about how cool this whole deal was. Then, sweating profusely under the baking 9:00am sun, we headed to our respective sides of the diamond. Reitoca was up to bat first, so we headed out to our fielding positions…PLAY BALL! (I actually shout this all the time when we play, the kids love it and I feel like I’m in the movie A League of Their Own). I was a nervous wreck the whole time, leaping around and spazzing out to the point where the kids asked me to sit down. As it turned out, I had no reason to be nervous, because my kids were so determined to get back the loss we’d suffered to Reitoca last week in the scrimmage that they played their hearts out. Reitoca struck out without a single run! Our turn at bat…after two outs, Las Panteras had batted and walked until the bases were loaded, with 9-year-old Nuria, one of my two girls, crouching on third. Lisbeth, my other girl, a stocky little 8-year-old who reminds me of myself as an 8-year-old softball player (terrified of the ball, prefers to sit deep in the outfield where one can chew on one’s leathery glove in peace or play with the dirt) was up to bat. All the boys groaned…Lisbeth can only hit slowly lobbed balls, and has never, in my knowledge, made contact with a real pitch…there was no way she was going to bring Nuria home. Pitch one…she swings a strike. Pitch two…another strike. Pitch three…BAM! Well, maybe not “bam,” she only hit it slightly past the pitcher, but she hit the damn ball! She stood there dumbfounded for a minute until all out frantic screams “CORRE!! CORRE!!!” sunk in and she threw the bat down and dashed off to first. Fortunately, Reitoca’s fielding skills are not 100% yet and through many fumbles of her gentle grounder, Lisbeth made it to first safely and Nuria shot across home plate, our first run of the game. It was awesome…all the boys raced over and lifted Nuria up and carried her around chanting “Nuria! Nuria!” while she beamed ear to ear. Then they ran over and did the same to Lisbeth, until I had to pull them off because the next batter was waiting and they were all over the field. It was so awesome for them, as the only girls on the team and arguably two of my worst players…who says girls can’t play baseball? Hm?! Anyway, the game continued with Reitoca striking out or getting tagged out, and we scored two more runs before the 5-inning cap was up, finishing with a glorious 3-0 win. We screamed and leapt around while Reitoca shuffled around disappointedly. Then I lead the troops of 40 kids down the road to Dona Marta’s house, who sells tasty meals and had agreed to cook the teams’ lunches, paid for by the mayor’s office, thanks to a well-worded request for funding sent by yours truly. The kids sat under the trees by the riverbed and ate their chicken and rice and guzzled bags of water while I sat inside with David and the umpires. After about an hour rest, we headed back to the field for the second game. This time, Reitoca was in it to win, and my kids entered somewhat cockily, despite my many warnings that anything could happen. Reitoca played much better and beat our butts 4-0. By this time, it was 2:30, and the sun was deadly overhead (no shade at our field). The cluster of families that had come to watch were wilting under black umbrellas and the bags of water we’d bought were long gone. However, it was 1-1, and a tie-breaking game was needed. I huddled up my kids and we screamed LAS PANTERS! LOS MEJORES! and I knew we were going to win…their energy was incredible. Reitoca started off at bat, and the inning ended without a run scored. Then we came up to bat, and scored an incredible four runs in the same inning, which for us was insane. I’ve never screamed so hard….the game was in the bag. Unfortunately, there is a rule that no pitcher can pitch more than 5 innings or one complete game, and at the conclusion of this first inning, my two good pitchers Neil and Kevin were now through. I had to put in Junior, who has trained as pitcher since November but remains pretty terrible, probably because I don’t know how to help him…he throws hard but always slightly to the left, AKA the king of balls. To the horror of everyone watching, and to his own increasing frustration, he proceeded to walk everyone and their mom across home plate…by the third inning Reitoca had caught up, 5-5. By the time the fifth and final inning ended, they had somehow crept past us and won 7-5. At first, my kids were incredulous. “That’s it? We lost? It’s over?” They had won last year (with one game against another town) and gone to Tegucigalpa for the championship, and had assumed they would naturally go again. Reitoca was ecstatic, screaming and shouting and jumping all over the place. My kids burst into tears…I’ve never seen so many 13-year-old boys in tears. It was terrible. They were inconsolable. I felt the worst for Junior, who took off running for his house and never came to my place for the after party with cake and soda, supplied by my project director Sandra. We had a good long talk at my house, and while they were still sniffling, I tried to explain that the world of sports is about losing just as much as it’s about winning, and that they played their very best and that’s all they can do. They ate their cake and drank their coke, but it still wasn’t a very fun party. We took this past week off to recuperate, and starting tomorrow, we’re going to practice once or twice a week, just for fun, until the rainy season begins, when we’ll throw in our hats until November, which it gets dry again.

To be honest, though, despite how much I hate losing (especially to freaking Reitoca, those cocky bastards…if David weren’t my dear pretend-site-mate I would never walk over there again…), it’s kind of a blessing in disguise that we lost, because my cessation of incessant baseball practicing has been seamlessly replaced by “tons of work,” at least in the Peace Corps sense. Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a two-hour English and teaching methodology class with about 40 teachers (20 each day) from my town and the surrounding villages, which is going excellently, thank you very much. They are all very eager to learn English and have great high spirits. I like it a lot more than I thought it would. Every Thursday I walk about half an hour up the mountain to reach a nearby aldea (village) called San Antonio, where I do Colgate-sponsored oral health with the 3-room school house of 1-6th grade (each teacher teaches two grades in one class). Starting this coming week, I’ll be doing the same project with the kindergarteners in my town, as well as another two-room schoolhouse in an aldea that’s about an hour away, called Santa Rita. It’s a great program; Colgate donated the toothpaste and toothbrushes and little posters for the kids to chart their progress, and they keep them at school in little labeled cups. Once a week I go in and do a little health chat and a project (usually an art-themed one, since they get no creative art at school). They we go outside and brush together, which is hilarious because the little kids dribbled all over themselves and the big kids are so embarrassed to be brushing their teeth in front of the opposite sex that they go through great lengths to hide themselves while brushing (squatting behind chairs, hiding in the outhouse, climbing trees, etc.). Igor comes with me, and keeps the kids in line by trotting around and jumping on them (trying to break this habit).

I just left my computer and went on an adventure!! It’s about 6:20 right now and getting dark, but we left about 45 minutes ago, at like 5:30 or so. It’s the best time of day here in my opinion, cause it’s toasty warm but not burny like the fire-death of sun. Me and my baby posse, plus my best buddy Nely, tramped though the hills to the dry river bed to collect mangos and let the dogs romp. Igor is turning into quite the water dog, to the point where I can’t leave any containers of water bigger than a cereal bowl on the floor inside or out, because he will sniff it out and frantically try to squeeze himself into it, this making a huge mess (last night I came outside to find him sitting happily in a big paila of water I had left under the faucet to fill up for watering plants (paila = plastic container)). I take him out every day to romp through the mango groves and he’ll race toward the little pools in the deeper spots of the dry river, charge in gulping water and spinning around until he’s soaked. If it’s deep enough he’ll swim around and then charge out at full speed, disappear, and then come back at a full gallop two seconds later, thrash into the water, and repeat the process. Once he’s thoroughly soaked, he’ll sprint off down the path—though I discovered if I hide behind a tree or don’t immediately follow him, once he realizes I’m not racing behind him he’ll come trotting back to look for me. I can’t wait to take him to the ocean some day….probably in the states, though, cause he really is getting too big for bus travel, except for the ones the guys in my pueblo drive, and that’s only because I’m the gringa and I can basically get away with murder.

That’s it for now…I’m excited because my parents sent me a great big box for my birthday filled with dried fruit, nuts, chocolate, and Newsweek magazines chock-filled with Obamamania…my favorite combination. Im’a gonna go lay in my hammock and indulge in said delights. I love you guys…Happy Spring to all you kids in Chicago that are finally thawing out.
Love,
Hayley