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
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
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