Friday, June 4, 2010

ayyyy que lluvia

Yesica, my now 8-year-old neighbor, doing the obligatory "mordida" on her birthday cake.

ana, my now 25-year-old special buddy, doin the obligatory crooked-honker-thing.

Nely and her mom Tina on morther's day. She tried to hide douglas behind her because he wasn't supposed to be part of the mother-daughter photo, but he snuck in anyway. Tina dyed her hair black for the occasion.

This kid can put away bonbones (suckers) like it's his well-paying but without-benefits JOB. Oh, douglitas. (p.s. mom and dad, do you recognize that shirt??)

tina, my boyfriend, and myself.

27 May 2010
Hey, chochachos! Guess what? IT’S REAL WINTER!!!! Hot damn and hooray, the rainy season is officially upon us and life is awesome. It’s been raining non-stop for nearly a week, and everything is a spongy, negative-moist Drippin’ Situation. It’s almost…too wet. The buses haven’t been able to get down the mountain for five days (if you’re reading this, it’s because I managed to get to Tegucigalpa today), everyone is a nice splattery-brown from the hips down and the roads are soupy, gooey disasters. However, everyone was thankful it finally began because after our little “fake winter” of a week of rain at the end of April, we had almost three full weeks without rain—which wouldn’t have been an issue if people had waited to plant their beans and corn like they were told to (on the news!!). But all that rain was just too beautiful to pass up and everyone decided that God had sent us an early Christmas present, and planted their crops. And then we had three weeks of bright blue skies and not a drop of rain, and everyone’s little three-inch-high green stalks wilted and threatened to suicide themselves. However, the “real” rains finally did descend upon Alubarén, not unlike the rivulets of back sweat that ran into my Nether Region and caused several unfortunate episodes of the ‘ol Swamp Ass. But (no pun intended), as previously mentioned, it’s Winter now and all can rejoice in the little mini rivers of cow crap and dead frog guts rushing through town down toward the river. Mmm. And let me tell you, NOTHING smells as delightful as the rotting corpse of a toad the size of a football, just outside the house but close enough to my neighbor Nelo’s property that it is officially his responsibility, not mine (nor anyone else’s, which I learned when I heard not one but several folks mention in passing, in the typical joking passive-aggressive manner of Hondurans, that Nelo and Nelo alone was responsible for disposing of the calf-sized amphibian stiff).

The good news is that since rain is now old news, the sudden and extreme hatchings of crotch-diver beetles and their associates have tapered off and I share my hammock with perhaps five beetles per night, as opposed to the 5,000,000 I was picking out of my plate of beans a month ago (here I am referring to my dinner, not creating some sort of lewd new euphemism for private parts). However, the bad news is that the relentless rains have saturated the dirt around my house, and all the little critters that live in said dirt, namely snakes and tarantulas, come sputtering up to the surface, gasping for air, and when they finally catch their breath decide that they’ve had enough of the Swamp Ass and why not try that nice, dry den over yonder, the one that smells like wet dog and Swedish Fish (thanks Erika!)?? I’ve actually yet to have any wriggly snakes up in here, but I know it’s just a matter of time. However, several tarantulas have gone on evening strolls through my home, though you’d think they’d learn that that kind of recreation just leads to a slow and painful death. Just two nights ago, I was lying in my hammock, watching a movie on my laptop (some awesome documentary about wolves with a lot of Native American flute music in it), when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Creepy, scuttle-y movement. Movement that instills a sense of panic in the observer, causing one to leap out of the hammock and flap her hands around in a weird gringa-fied version of the finger-snap that Hondurans do to express surprise/humor/fright/exhaustion/many other things, and is really cool when they do it, but makes certain North American ladies look like they’re suffering from some kind of spastic mental problem because she doesn’t actually do the snappy thing but just shakes both hands as if flinging water droplets off….anyway. It was a big, black, furry spider, about the size of a grapefruit, with ambition the size of a soccer ball. I leapt out of my hammock and flapped my hands around for a bit, as previously mentioned, but was too scared to smash it with a broom because it was so freaking big and I knew it would get all splattery and such (for those of you who don’t know me, I am a huge arachnophobic. As in, I should be receiving government money to pay for my condition, it’s so debilitating.) Plus, my broom was outside by the pila. So I raced into my room and quickly found my can of cheap, Honduran-brand Raid (called Oko) and, trying not to pee my pants out of my butt, sprayed the bastard from an entirely useless distance of seven feet. He just kind of looked at me and chuckled, and kept on scuttling till he reaching the baseball duffle bags I have stacked up by the door, which he wisely hid behind. Too freaked out to dig him out and finish the job, I just slammed my laptop shut, hit the lights and leapt into bed, tucking and re-tucking my mosquito net around me like a kid with OCD. Trembling, I lay awake until about 6:30, convinced every scuttle-y noise was the sound of a vengeful furball coming to position himself directly above my face on the net, which is my absolute worst fear in life. Once the sun was up, I ran across the street, fetched my bleary-eyed neighbor Elias, and waited outside wringing my hands while he calmly pulled the bags to the side, smashed the spider with my broom, swept him outside, and went back across the street, no doubt to return to bed. Now I find myself glancing over my shoulder every couple of minutes (just now, for example), convinced I’m going to see another goliath in the exact same spot I saw the other one last night. (Nope, all clear.) Que patetica.

In other news, I am now officially done with this 3-month workshop I’ve been doing in the high school, for four hours a week. Designed to orient them in the job market, help them select appropriate future careers or jobs based on their skills and aptitudes, and learn how to be successful employees and/or bosses, it’s one of those things that has awesome material and is entirely useful, so of the course the teenagers couldn’t care less. Though I can’t blame them; if I was a bored high schooler and some foreign lady with just two different outfits and extreme pit-stains came and yelled at me about the future every week, I’d hate it too. They didn’t put much into the workshop, and it’s hard to say how much they got out of it, but it’s over, so thank god. I never want to work with high school kids again. I am a Babies dame through and through, and that’s the truth.

I also finally had my baseball clausura (obligatory closing-of-ceremonies, with cake and diplomas). I made a huge fruit salad (though accidentally including a rancid cantaloupe which people were too polite to comment on but almost killed me when I tried a piece), bought a cake and 18 liters of Coke. We also had a scary clown-ish piñata named Ruperto (thanks, Dona Marta!) and the kids all got fancy Peace Corps diplomas and some pictures I’d had printed up of them from the games. It was sort of slam-blam-thank-you-senora, but since a thunder storm was a-brewin’, it was for a best that we hustled along from speech-to-pinata-to-fruit-to-diaplomas-to-cake-to-adios. The parents sat around and slipped extra bowls of fruit into their purses to bring home to grandma while I handed out little awards for best batter and fielder, most improved, best attitude, and MVP (all of which I selected one for both boys and girls, except the MVP, la Mera Pantera). It was hella cute. I’ll miss playing baseball in the melting sun every day….and by miss it, I mean not a day goes by that I don’t wake up and give myself a high five for not having to play baseball today. WORST. SPORT. EVER. THERE I SAID IT. We should have started a professional recreational swimmin’ hole splashing team.

My little literacy project is going awesome. I’ve got about 10 second-grades and 10 third-graders, all of whom were selected to participate by their teacher because they couldn’t read. I come by once a week and pull them out of class one by one and hustle them into the library, where all the magic is. Each kid is given a Ziplock baggie with an index card in it, with a group of words (or syllables, if they can’t do whole words yet) written on it that they must practice at home. After a week’s time, we sit together again in the library, and if they can read the card without difficulty and errors, they get to select a prize from the Treasure Chest and move onto the next card. If not, they stick with the same card until they learn it. First we did vowels, then vowels paired with the letter ‘m’ (so they get a card with ma, me, mi, mo, mu), then words (mama, mime, mame, etc.). Once they pass ‘m’, they move onto ‘p’ and practice “papa, pipa, pepe,” etc. Then it’s onto Level 2, with “s”, “l”, “n”, and then onto level three….there are six levels in all. Almost all the kids started unable to identify the vowels and nearly all the children are now onto Level Two, so we’re slowly but surely making progress. It’s awesome, because these are the kids that usually sit in the back and aren’t given any school work because their lazy teachers know they can’t read and won’t be able to do the work anyway. But not anymore! Yay literacy!

In other library-themed news, I almost killed a man the other day. The roof in the library has been leaking badly for two years now, due to an askew piece of metal. Fixing it was just a matter of climbing up there and yanking the thing back in place, which we (the library committee) have been talking about doing for two years and keep putting it off. Finally, I got sick of waiting for “tomorrow,” which as we all know never comes, and took matters into my own hands. I marched over to this guy Tito’s house, who does odd jobs and had previously agreed to climb up and do the job, and dragged him with me and his little ladder to the school yard. He clamored up, walked along the metal-enforced beam along the middle of the peaked room, and fixed the hole in about two seconds. Then he came back and began to climb down the ladder, but felt insecure placing his left foot after his right, as it couldn’t quite reach the rung without him slipping down a bit more. So he climbed back up and started walking along the roof toward the other side, to see if he could climb down that way, while I’m still standing there holding the ladder. All of the sudden I heard a huge crash and some guy on the other side of the walls screams “TITO’S DEAD!” My heart stopped and I raced around the corner, chanting “ohmygodohmygod,” and ran right smack into Tito, who was strolling out of the library, brushing debris off his pants. “The roof is rotten,” he commented, and stooped to pick up his bike to head up the hill to open the water valves (one of his jobs in town). There was now a pony-sized hole in the roof, and the roof is not particularly low. When I asked him how in the world he wasn’t hurt, he just shrugged and said he landed standing up, “como Espider Mahn.” I couldn’t stop shaking, paralyzed with the thought that I’d almost killed a father of six, but he was totally nonchalant and even laughing about it. We spent the next week fixing the roof with three new sheets of zinc metal, to replace the rotten asbestos (yes, all the school and educational buildings here are made with poisonous roofs, and they don’t care it’s bad for you—it’s “much cooler than a metal roof,” so it’s worth it). We had to use nearly half of the money we had in our library fund…what was a 30 lempira project of 10 minutes turned into a 600 lempira week-long endeavor. So much for making a positive different in my community.

If my two-year adventure here in Honduras was a day, then I would now be bathed in the crispy golden light of late-afternoon. I still have enough time to scamper around and do several Items of extreme Fun and Utility, but soon the sun is gonna duck behind the green bowl of mountains that surround this pueblo and I’ll have to head home before the it gets too dark to watch where I step. Every day people ask me “Ya se va?!”, Are you leaving now?!, to which I always respond, NO of course not, I’m here till September! At which point they point out that’s only four months away and I won’t even be here for the squash harvest. No, I say, but at least I’ll be here for the fair and independence day. Yes, they say. That’s true. At least you’ll be here for the fair (which is a joke because the fair here sucks). Anyway, I haven’t really, TRULY begun to process that my life here is winding down, but I talk about it every day and I assume that soon real gut-feeling will kick in with those words. Until then, please enjoy my artful sunset metaphor in lieu of real emotional insight into what leaving my sweaty, loving home for the past two years feels like.

At least maybe once I get back to the states I’ll stop talking to myself so much. Seriously, I’m getting concerned. I do voices and everything.

Love
Hayley

P.S. Thursday, June 3, 2010 UPDATE!! I never did get to Tegus last week…soon after I wrote last week’s blog, what was delightful amounts of rain turned into a 5-day non-stop downpour of Extreme Negative Moist proportions, which is to say, hurricane-y. Or rather, there were several hurricanes “around” (like Guatemala and the Pacific coast) which turned into what any credible meteorologist would describe as “butt-loads of rain for H-town.” To quote little ‘ol Tom Robbins, “It rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. It rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.” The river outgrew its banks like a one of those people with giantism might outgrow childhood pants—way to quickly, and to such a degree as to make people stare with grim nervousness. Which is exactly what Alubarén did. As the days progressed (eight days without electricity, six days without bridges in or out of town), the folks gathered near the river in tank tops and umbrellas to watch the crashing river take out entire trees and rush away with insane amounts of plastic garbage. All our bridges were under water, and people began stocking up on food, fearing that a lack of transport would result in a shortage (I just bought an entire sack of coffee, which we drank by the gallon daily). Folks here are pretty nervous about hurricanes, since Hurricane Mitch spanked the dickens outta Honduras 10 years ago, but we were fortunate and no one in my town suffered severe flooding in the house or anything like that. And once the rains began to let up a bit, people relaxed and it was downright enjoyable. No work, no school, just hangin’ around in shorts and sweatshirts (yes! it was below 90!) and drinking cup after cup of sugary black coffee until it grew dark; then rocking in hammocks to the flickery light of candles until established bedtime of electricity-less days, which is 7:30pm. Now it’s back to normal, but the river is still very strong. Be careful babies!