dear john, im sorry i made baseball lame.

beach day! the whole gang...except for little andri, who was passed out in the shade.
esau found some cangrejas...which he brought back to alubaren in a pepsi bottle and then fried in lard and bullion cubes.
douglas playin with the boats.
splashin' around with grandma
SO SALTYYYYY
cute swimsuit little lady
grandma tina and her nietos
ah, cedeno...
esau, nuria, lisbeth, alison and noel...in the swishy swashy warm waters
douglas in his little sand lounge chair
they'll be pickin sand out of their butts for weeks
diggin and jumpin
playin soccer!! before some chumps swiped it
douglas playin in the sand
"I'm on a boat, ******-******!" says Andri. "Got my flippy-floppies!" agrees Douglas.
the kids and igor with some side-walk chalk art they did on my house...yeah i been doin some external decorating lately.

the serious shot.

21 February 2010
Hey, chochachos! It’s about 8:00pm on Sunday night, and I am waiting quite patiently for my Hayley Rice to finish….which is, in case the reader is wondering, is rice. With tomatoes and green peppers and onions. Hells yes Also, I have some spicy sausage I am gonna throw in there, and then throw in my MOUTH. Naum naum naum, naum.

So I’m a big fan of the concept of “Beach Day!”, in which one packs the car with sandwiches, soda, and Frisbees, and takes to the beach with one’s buddies for swimming and adventures. Honduras is nestled in the tender bosom of not one but two oceans, so in my hunk of time here I’ve had many opportunities to embark on such Beach Days. My neighbors, “Nely and the kids” (a nickname I have for them, which my buddy Patrick says should always be followed by “The Country Jam-Band”) always stay and take care of Igor while I cavort around the country, my pockets heavy with US tax-payers’ money, and I always feel guilty that I can travel about so easily and they can’t, ‘cause they’re hella poor. So we decided as an early “Semana Santa” adventure, we would embark on a Beach Day adventure of our own. I went to the market on Thursday and bought all the fixins’ for tamales (corn flour mix, potatoes, chicken, onions, sweet pepper, vegetable-based lard, spices and salts) and Friday afternoon we made about 60 chunkity ‘ol tamales, wrapped up steamy in huge green banana leaves. Then we packed baskets with blankets, towels, extra clothes, water, sunscreen, the works. Saturday morning, at 5:00am, my landlord Rony, who is married to Nely’s half-sister Mirian, pulled up outside the house with his two kids, Esau and Nuria (and his pockets full of gas money, provided by Uncle Sam). Nely, little Douglas, and her dad Ruben (the old man with Parkinson’s, if you recall) sat up front while the rest of us (Tina, Elias, Esau, Nuria, Lisbeth, Andri, Alison, Noel, and me) settled onto the foam pad we’d placed in the truck bed. The kids chattered excitedly about what the beach would be like (none of them had ever been to the ocean), while little motion-sick Alison barfed continuously into various plastic bags, which were then ceremoniously dumped over the edge of the car into the dirt as we flew along. We watched the stars disappear and the sun come up over the mountains as we drove along, and after an hour and a half we reached the paved road. By 8:00am, we arrived at the southern beach town of Cedeno, parked the car near a little shack at one end of the beach, and unloaded ourselves into the sand. This particular shack provided chairs, shade, and hammocks to the folks who purchased their wares, so we bought a bunch of sodas to complement our bucket packed to the brim with tamales. The kids stripped down to their underwear in about three seconds and sprinted toward the surf. “AHHH IT’S SALTY!! IT’S SALTY!! OH NO!!!” screamed Alison, totally upset by the fact she couldn’t drink it. “MY EYES! THEY BURN!” They quickly got used to the salt water, though, and from that moment on until we left at 3:00pm, the kids didn’t leave the ocean once (except to ingest tamales as quickly as Science would allow). I had brought my Frisbee and Noel his new soccer ball my dad sent him, but both toys went basically unused as the kids were way too enthralled by the crashing waves. We played a Catcher in the Rye type game in which I would stand waist-deep in the water and snag the kids as the receding surf dragged them out…then, as the waves rolled in, I would launch them like little brown surf-boards and they would “surf” in. The only people who didn’t enjoy the water were Ruben, who shuffled around dressed for the office in leather shoes, pinstriped slacks, and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and Douglas and Andri, the two-year-olds, who were so terrified by the immense body of water that they refused to even go near it. However, there were little fishing boats pulled up on the sand, and they had a great time climbing around and playing in the sand (Douglas tried to eat it, and then sat there gagging until someone ran over and rinsed his mouth out). At 3pm, we piled back into the truck and set off for home. This time, the ride was much more unpleasant, because the sun-burned, tired kids were very cranky and we were all melting under the blistering sun. At least Alison wasn’t puking nonstop again; she passed out in my lap after 10 minutes in and slept almost the whole way home. When we arrived at 6:00pm, everyone took baths and then we made a quick dinner of eggs, chorizo, cream, and tortillas before calling it an early night. The kids passed out on the floor, on top of the same dirty pad we’d had in the truck, mumbling about waves (I bet they all pissed the bed). Hells yes Beach Day!

I’ve suddenly found myself rather busy, which is nice. I began TEAM (Teaching English and Methodology) classes this week, with 16 teachers, and that went quite smoothly. I went by the high school one morning, to recruit baseball players, and mentioned to the principal that I’d like to start a project called “Youth to Youth: Work Skills and Orientation”; a 10-session, 40-hour work-shop that helps the kids identify their aptitudes and labor interests and, once they’ve identified possible careers or jobs they might enjoy, orients them on how to pursue them. It’s very intense and work-heavy, both for the facilitator and the participants, and I’ve been stressing about it because my counter-part that was trained in how to facilitate the program with me has since jumped ship and enrolled in the Police Academy—I’m flyin’ solo. So anyway, I sit down with the principal, and she whips out her little calendar, and figures out when the 11th and 12th graders could sacrifice an entire morning. We decide that Fridays would be best, and she announces that we must begin the NEXT DAY. I stay up until freakin’ 2:00am creating all the visual aids I would need and preparing, and wake up at 5:45am to I can get to the school by 7:00am. Despite my sleep deprivation and nervousness, the workshop went really well for the first day and the kids seemed into it (the methodology is excellent and uses a lot of games and activities). I enjoy it, sort of…though pre-schoolers and little guys like that are much more my thing and dealing with 37 high schoolers was definitely a challenge for me…they definitely think I’m super lame (probably because I kept telling jokes and doing things that can only be fairly described as such). We had the next session the next day, Friday, and from now one will have one session per week until we finish. Oh heavens.

On the baseball front, Las Panteras have suffered a revolution and an abrupt re-enrollment. After we lost our first game, all the big kids that have played baseball for two years decided baseball is no longer cool, and ceremoniously quit (including my pitchers, catchers, and best basemen). I tried everything—talking to their parents, talking to them, going to the school—but it’s a closed case. Baseball is officially Hella Lame. I went to the school and recruited heavily, and all this week I’ve had numbers higher than I’ve seen all year—20 kids came on Wednesday, and 24 on Friday. But the dynamics are totally different. Before, the kids were the same ones who played with John (the volunteer before me)—generally well-behaved, successful kids whose parents are involved in the community and the churches. And, since they began with John, most of the kids were now pretty big and pretty good players. However, since they all quit, the ranks have been re-filled with all the little ragamuffins—the kids who roam the pueblo all day because their parents don’t care, little urchins who do poorly in school and stay up until 10:00pm every night playing soccer in the street because they don’t have enforced bedtimes. A lot of them have drunks for dads, and these kids have mouths on ‘em that would make a very surly pirate blush and say, “Well, I never!”. Essentially, these little guys, the smelly kids at school, have become the core of Las Panteras. Baseball is no longer for the cool kids, it’s for the underdogs. This interesting social phenomenon came about very abruptly—I didn’t specifically invite this crowd of kids, I just issued a general invitation at the school and showed up a the baseball field the next day, expecting nobody to show and instead being greeted by 20 very punctual children, all eager to play. It’s frustrating, because the regional championship is in April and I’m now starting from scratch with kids who have no idea how to play baseball, but it’s awesome having a group of kids who are just there to play and not obsessing over whether or not we win our little scrimmages against Reitoca. And the best part of all is that these kids, who are always getting yelled at in school and bear the reputation of the “bad kids” have now accomplished two practices in which they were as good as GOLD. No cussing, no fighting, no rudeness (except for one kid who straight-up peed on another kid…needless to say, Pee Boy has been removed from the team). Maybe this will act as a catalyst in a life-changing metamorphosis in these children, and then Disney will make a movie about it. The rag-tag group of misfits who manage to win the big game…just like in Wet Hot American Summer. Only instead of calling it off and running off into the woods, we actually will play and it will be Awesome.

Love,
Hayley

P.S. I just found a tarantula the size of my face chillin on my bedroom wall. But my neighbor squished it with a broom so it's cool.

sucks to be losers

Igor and our basil forest. yes, i eat pesto weekly, so what?

Las Panteras, posing in my yard during our after-party (celebrating that we...lost? i dont know.)

Some of the kiddies in the Readers Club, with notebooks and McDonald's toys. Ah, literacy!

Making egg-carton dragons.

Aurelio is too busy to smile.

Little Elvin, my neighbor, gettin' to work.

Nice polar bear Cristian!

Dancing polar bears, la la la...

Escarleth and friends gettin' busy durin arts and farts and crafts.

6 February 2010
Hey, chochachos! Well hooty-hoo, lookit that, a whole month has passed since my last blog. You guys have probably been super bored. I hope you all took advantage of your new-found free time and tackled those projects you’ve had hovering for the past few years (200 piece jigsaw puzzles, cleaning your toenails, writing your thesis, etc.). Anyway, you can put down that letter to grandma, because I got a hot new steamy blog all ready for ya’s. Topped with Funyons!

Today was a sweaty bummer. After training Las Panteras in the stupid sport of baseball for the past three months (practicing EVERY DAY for two hours in the punishing Honduran sun), we finally had our first game today—a scrimmage against neighbors Reitoca, who are trained by my fellow Peace Corps buddy David. Now, last year, we managed to lose every single game we played against Reitoca except for one, and this year it’s been rough going trying to get the kids to show up for practice—they’re all like “Why play if we’re just gonna lose?” and “We’d rather play soccer!” Of course, there are still loads of kids who want to play, mainly groups of 8-year-old girls who idolize me. I can’t seem to get the 12-year-old boys to follow suit. Anyway, despite the resounding negativity, I felt confident that we could win the game with a little luck, and so we set out parading behind our banner toward the field at about 8:00am this morning. We got there, marked the field with ashes the kids brought from their mom’s wood-ovens, warmed up, and began the game. In the first inning, Reitoca didn’t get a single player on base, and we scored a run with a “jonron!” It was awesome. 1-0, bitches. Then the next inning, no changes. Then, in the third inning, Reitoca got lucky and scored three runs, mainly due to a crazy fluke batter who sent the ball into the bowels of left field, leaving our outfielders searching in the weeds. Finally, we reached the final inning (we only play five here). We batted second, and we found ourselves with two outs, bases loaded. It was Kelvin’s turn to bat, a new-comer who has a lot of spunk but whose technique is basically “swing wildly at anything, no matter what.” I kept yelling “Wait for the good ones! Don’t swing!,” hoping he’d get walked to first base and thus earn us a run. Pitch one. STRIKE. Pitch two. STRIKE. Pitch three….WHAM! Kelvin smacks it, straight to…first base. Our guy on third runs as hard as he can toward home, but the first baseman stomps the bag, thus ending the game, before our guy can cross the plate. We were soooo close to tying it up, but it just wasn’t in the cards…my kids were furious. Half the bigger kids threw their gloves down and stomped off, others dissolved into tears, were teased by the others, and then tried to fight them. It was a disaster. After screaming “Come BACK here, you guys! C’mon!” the kids finally grouped up so I could give them a little pep talk. We almost did it, you guys played great, don’t feel bad, we’ll get ‘em next time…but you could tell they didn’t want to hear it. I invited them all to come to my house at 2:00pm for the after-party (which I’d planned as a hopeful celebratory event, alas) and we went our separate ways, while Reitoca drove slowly down the road in their giant truck whooping and taunting. It was pretty sad.

At two, all the kids showed up (each player toting about 5 siblings), and I cranked up the Rolling Stones and handed out puzzles, paper and markers, and the kids amused themselves playing tag and coloring while I dished out watermelon, popcorn, and home-made orange smoothies to 33 children. Then we circled up under my big cherry tree and talked about the game. Since they were all much more chilled out, this time it went a lot better, and we talked about how close the game had been and how if it wasn’t for that crazy left-field slammer we would have won. We talked about sportsmanship and how we weren’t always going to lose; how the next game could be different and how important it is to keep trying and not give up. Blah, blah, you guys are losers, you’re never going to account to anything…I like to tell it to ‘em straight. Then I brought out a big piñata filled with candy and little toys, and the kids smashed it to pieces. Only two kids got cracked in the head! New record! Then I sent them home and spent the next hour picking up watermelon rinds and plastic cups. Boo…urns.

Oh, well. I’m thinking of making t-shirts for everyone that says “There’s No Crying in Baseball…Even when you lose every single game, ever, because your coach secretly hates baseball and is no good at teaching it.” Wouldn’t that be cute?

The dry season is in full-swing. Or should I say, Honduras, most especially the south, is getting totally boned by a terrible draught. And it’s not consensual boning, if you receive my meaning. And I think that you do. Every sponge-full of water taken from the pila is measured and used carefully, and every drop of dirty water is conserved to dump in the toilet or sprinkle on my Basil Forest I’ve planted in the yard. The guy in charge of opening and closing the water valves in the community has become a hated man, as every day that goes by without water, everyone mutters, “That guy NEVER gives me water.” People accuse others of sneaking up and closing the valves a little after he leaves, so less water leaves, leaving more for themselves when it’s their turn. When the water does come, it comes in spurts and dribbles, and people stand agonized by their pilas, hoping it will be enough to add a couple inches of water. There are days when I have not a single drop, and I can’t bathe, can’t brush my teeth, can’t wash my clothes, can’t flush out the latrine, can’t even drink (on those days, I head sheepishly down to my neighbors, who often have water when I don’t, and vice-versa—we’re on different water lines). The other day my landlord woke me up at 6:00am hollering my name at the gate, and I walked outside rubbing my eyes to the sight of Rony standing on the steps in a towel—“Hayley, we haven’t got any water—can I take a bath here?” It’s an exercise in community support, because as much as I hate to give away even a drop of my precious water, I know there will be a time when I’ll have to go clean up at their house, too. The hills have turned brown, the river is totally dry, and all the soft luscious green plants have dried out and turned into vicious thorns and spines. The air is hot and dry all day long, and only at dusk do we get any kind of relief from the heat. Many of the corn and bean crops suffered from our dry winter and people are going hungry. The good news is that the mango trees are flowering and some of the other dry-season fruit trees are producing, so money can soon be made selling that produce in the market in Tegucigalpa.

Next Monday, school begins, thus ending the 4-month summer vacation for the kids, and for me as well. I’ve spent my summer break doing daily baseball and twice-weekly “Readers Club” in the library, and that’s about it. Bout time for some real work…I was beginning to get incredibly lazy. We’re going to reduce baseball to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the Readers Club has finished. It was great while it lasted, though…the kids loved it. The little guys came on Monday mornings, and the big kids on Wednesdays. First, the kids spent about half an hour reading silently to themselves, choosing from the books I’d laid out on the tables. Then, they circle up, and each kid shares the book he read and what it was about. Then, I read a story out loud, and then the kids retire to the tables for a related art project. For example, after we read “The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush,” all the kids were given a sheet of white paper and watercolors and painted sunsets. Or another time, we read “Lars the Polar Bear,” and the kids glued cotton balls to cut-outs of polar bears and glued them to Artic scenes they painted themselves. To celebrate the last meeting, this week we read “The Paper-Bag Princess” and “Leo and Memo,” both of which feature dragons and/or crocodiles. Then I handed out egg-cartons and they painted them green (though most of them opted to paint them multi-colored for some reason) and we turned them into scary, toothy reptilian monsters. Then I handed out as prizes some notebooks Mom’s friend Leetha had sent me, and some crappy little McDonald’s toys I’d had donated. And that was that! The kids were all begging me to keep the club going, but we can’t do it in the mornings because they have class, and I won’t have time to do it in the afternoons. But our new superintendent is on the Library Committee, so I’m hoping to get him to force the teachers to take their classes to the library once a week for silent reading or story hour, something they flat-out refused to do last year.

I’ll be starting “Team 2” in a week or so, which will be the same English classes I was giving to the teachers as the year before, only now it’s a level up. I’ll also be starting my “Yo Merezco” abstinence-education and female-empowerment workshop with the fifth and sixth-grade girls. I’ll continue doing oral-hygiene education in the village schools with free toothbrushes and toothpaste for all the kids, courtesy of Colgate, and I’ll also continue with my Pregnant Women’s Club and Hypertension Workshops in the Health Center. In March, I’ll begin a three-month workshop called “Youth to Youth,” which orientates and trains junior and seniors in high school in how to prepare themselves for the work-force after high school—gets them thinking about their characteristics and aptitudes, about what sort of work they would enjoy, or whether they would be better suited as entrepreneurs, and how to successfully apply for a job. Plus we throw in healthy doses of decision-making, self-esteem improvement, and life-skills such as good communication and positive coexistence with other people. Should be fun, but the manual is very complicated and I’m nervous because the counter-part I was supposed to do it with has left to join the police academy, so I have to train someone new. Finally, I’m going to start a Nature Club in the elementary school and give classes on environment education, and the kids are going to get baby trees through an NGO called “Trees for the Future.” They’ll tend these fruit tree saplings themselves, and then they get to take them home and plant them in their homes. Oh, and we’re going to do pen-pals with another third-grade class in the states!

At the end on the month, I’ll have my annual “Re-Connect” conference in which all the Youth Development volunteers get together to share knowledge and stuff. I’m psyched though, ‘cause I’m going to leave a couple days early and go camping in La Tigra national forest with some fellow volunteers. Then, a week later, I’m going to go climb the highest peak in Honduras, Montana de Celaque! I’m gonna capture a gnome and roast him over a spit. No reason. Just feel like it.

Finally, in political news, Pepe Lobo took up the charge as Honduras’ new president a couple weeks ago, amid much fanfare in the national soccer stadium (the best part was Pepe doing laps around the stadium in a glorified go-cart and waving happily at the people while sexy ladies danced around him and dudes dressed in white did some good ‘ol fashioned Ribbon Dancing. It was excellent). Our ex-prez Zelaya (you may remember him from such coups in which he was removed by force and then exiled to the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa) is now, I imagine, drinking a remarkably-garnished beverage on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, which is to be his new home. Be careful, Zelaya, don’t get sunburned! I imagine he must be mighty pasty after so many months without stepping outside.

Time to get goin’, chochachos…I have to go to a vigil for a women in my community who died about a week ago, of a heart attack (I was actually in the health center with my pregnant women when she was carried in by three men, followed by a string of wailing daughters…they placed her on the table, the doctor checked her vitals, declared her dead, and then the center suddenly filled with mourning family members). This makes the fourth death in my community in the past month, all of them heart attacks…too much grease and salt in the diet! I don’t think their habits are close to changing, despite the educational attempts by the health center and the constant reminder that a fatty diet leads to high-blood pressure and heart attacks. Sometimes it feels very, very futile.

Love,
Hayley