Merry Christmas everyone! Hopefully you are all enjoying cookies, hot chocolate, the English language, and (for most of you) snow. Obviously the past couple of weeks have been a bit hard and I have missed everyone back in the US. I have been coping by basically ignoring the fact that it is indeed the holiday season. I am pretending that it is a Honduran holiday, and that Christmas is not occurring in the states. It has worked pretty well and have thus far avoided a major emotional breakdown. Woo! I have also been pretty busy which has helped to keep my mind off missing all of you.
- My classes officially ended about a week before Christmas. I can’t say that I was particularly sad to see them end, I was definitely ready to stop teaching English for a while. We had parties in all of my classes and the kids all got diplomas. Diplomas are sort of like gold here, everyone is really keen on getting them. I made some pretty pitiful diplomas for my little kids and then casually asked my colegio kids if they wanted them, expecting a no because they were really stupid looking. I got a resounding yes and they looked at me like I was crazy for thinking they might not want a piece of paper with my signature on it. A woman that helped organize the kids in one of my classes even asked for one (I didn’t really know what to say, considering she didn’t actually attend the classes, so I told her I would make her a special thank you certificate…) So yea, now my classes are over and I am not really sure what I am going to do with myself in the coming weeks, hopefully not get roped into more English classes.
- The 16th was one of my host brother’s birthday. A bunch of extended family came into town to celebrate. It was interesting. As I may have mentioned, my host siblings are not exactly the most angelic of children (if kids had settings theirs would seem to be stuck permanently on “whine,” occasionally slipping into “total meltdown over nothing”). It is a pain but they are fun to be around in their good moments (and occasionally their bad moments are so ridiculous it is funny). However, apparently this trait runs in the family. So with the addition of three cousins I began to get slightly overwhelmed. A sample day: 8 am, I go into the house to eat cornflakes, 4 year old wants coke for breakfast. There is no coke in the house. “COOOOOKKKKKKEEEEEEE WANNNNNTTT COOOKKKKKKEEEEEE WAAAANNNNNTTT COOOOKKKEE” I shove my cornflakes down my throat so fast I almost choke in an effort to get out of there. 8:30, I wash my clothes at the pila, all the kids want me to set up a badminton* net because the instructions are in English (badminton? Really?). I attempt to set up the net while 5 kids attempt to help me (ie crawl on me and grab things from me). One kid is holding some badminton doohickey, another wants said doohickey “I WANNNNNNT I NEEEEEEEED AHHHHAKDFJLEWIF” I tell them no one will be playing badminton unless they all sit on the stairs and hush. This has no effect. I continue to set up badminton. 9:00, one kid has 5 lemps for snacks, another has 4, world war 3 follows. Lunch time: repeat of the coke scene from earlier……you get the point, will not be overwhelmingly sad to see the extended family leave. * I always thought badminton was badmitten. Apparently it is not. Unless badminton means something else and spell check is fooling me. I guess badmitten is a stupid name considering there are no mittens in badminton, let alone bad ones.
- Luckily for me, the Intibuca volunteers planned a holiday party in La Esperanza so I was able to escape for a couple days. We made Christmas cookies and our host was lovely enough to keep us stuffed full of homemade snack foods all day. We also had some truly terrible mixed drink combinations, which seemed like a wonderful idea at the time. We sat around all day listening to Christmas music and talking. Around 10 two backpackers showed up, one from Australia and the other from Argentina. They joined in the festivities. It was a lot of fun. The next day we all ran various errands, made some guacamole (which is christmasy because it is green and red…) and then watched a Christmas movie. Afterwards the girls watched a black market copy of New Moon while the guys made, and served, us pizza and beer. It was definitely a wonderful way to spend the day. The next day I returned to the land where the wrong sort of whine flows freely.
- Christmas Eve was certainly an experience. I spent a majority of the day helping make tamales, which are corn flour blobs with some chunks of meat, peas, etc wrapped in palm leaves. I am not a huge fan of tamales and really don’t get why people spend so much time making them because they aren’t even that great and are super labor intensive. But, I helped nonetheless. During a brief tamale intermission, I was in the kitchen helping my host mom prep the giant chunk of pig she was going to cook in the oven. She had already turned the oven on and was waiting for it to preheat. In the middle of smearing stuff on the giant slab of meat I looked over and saw smoke pouring out of the oven. Although I am no expert on Honduran appliances, I figured this was wrong. I alerted my host mom and she proceeded to yank and giant plastic bucket filled with bread and a cloth out of the oven and throw it on the kitchen floor. The bucket and the cloth were on fire, consequently there was a giant fireball on the kitchen floor. Everyone stood around looking at it for a couple seconds and then I grabbed another bucket with about an inch of water in it and threw it on the fire. Then I started trying to stamp it out with my flipflops (less than intelligent). Luckily the fire went out and we were able to continue tamale making within minutes.
- Later that day I looked out in the field and saw my host siblings and cousins playing a very interesting game. The 12 year old was on his motorcycle (full grown motorcycle, 70 pound boy, good combo) and the rest of the kids were chasing him around the field. Playing tag with a motorcycle, never a good idea. Especially when the driver of the motorcycle can’t touch the ground with his feet and just learned to drive it a week ago. Luckily and surprisingly, there were no major injuries. Those came later. After dinner all of the kids made a bonfire in the field. They sat around it and lit fireworks. And by fireworks, I mean little bombs and fireballs. And by all the kids I mean ALL the kids, including the 4 year olds. Nothing like watching kids that can’t tie their shoes play with explosives. My host brother decided that he should probably put the motorcycle in the garage (wouldn’t want the inanimate object to be harmed by explosives). He turned on the bike and attempted to walk beside it and roll it into the garage. It was working fine but then he had to go up a little hill to turn the bike around. This is when the trouble started. He gunned the motor to get the bike up the hill and (not surprisingly) the 400 pound bike pulled the 70 pound boy off the ground. The bike roared right through the crowd of us standing around the bonfire. It clipped grandma and then hit the 9 year old cousin, then fell over pinning the cousin and my host brother dangerously close to the bonfire. I managed to wrestle the bike off the kids and luckily there were no serious injuries, only some scrapes and bruises. Considering the multitude of dangerous activities the kids partook in that day, I think they got off easy.
- In Honduras, it is tradition to stay up until 12 and eat dinner then on Christmas Eve. We didn’t eat dinner at 12 because of all the kids but my host mom, aunts, abuela, and dad stayed up until 12 talking. At 12 we all hugged and then my abuela burst into tears. A couple months ago one of her daughters died (allegedly of H1N1) so this Christmas was difficult for all of them. Then everyone in the room started crying and I awkwardly sat at the table and fiddled with the table cloth. I felt terrible for all of them because I know it was hard for me to deal with Christmas without my family and they are just in the states, not gone forever. Needless to say, this was a rather sobering experience and I hope they all find some peace in the coming year.
- On Christmas day we planned to get up really early and head to El Salvador around 6am to go to the beach. I dutifully set my alarm and was up and ready to go at 5:30. I walked down to the house to eat breakfast and realized no one was actually awake. So I returned to my bed for another hour and tried again. This time, people were actually sort of awake so I ate and then sat around for a couple hours waiting to leave. We ended up leaving the house around 8:15. Since we left so late, we decided not to go all the way to the beach, but to go to a river instead (bummer). A big bonus in El Salvador is paved roads. I had forgotten what it felt like to go over 30 miles an hour. We went to the river and swam and had lunch. I was a big hit because I can actually swim and they constantly requested that I go back in the water so they could watch me swim (a bit awkward). A couple hours later we headed home. By the time we got home I was exhausted (the car ride home was basically one long meltdown for all the kids) and I called the parentals and then went to bed early.
- Yesterday my host mom asked me if I wanted to go to Llano Grande, one of the aldeas. I assumed we were going to her mom’s house to eat lunch so I said yes. Little did I know we were actually going to a political rally to mooch carne asada. It was a very awkward assembly and very hot with very little shade and they ended up running out of food. During the speeches a bolo (drunk) kept walking up to the speakers and trying to shake their hands, which was amusing. We left after we realized there was no food to be had and piled in the pickup truck to go home. About halfway home my host mom (who was sitting in the back) started pounding on the roof and telling us to stop. My host dad pulled over to see what was wrong. She informed us that there was a bolo passed out in a ditch on the side of the road and we may or may not have run over his leg. We all ran to the bolo (who was in fact, the same bolo shaking everyone’s hands a few minutes earlier) to see if he was all right. He was in and out of it but someone said he claimed a motorcycle ran over his leg, not the truck. We loaded him in another truck and they drove him into town and someone called the doctor (who, coincidently, is also the mayor and who was one of the speakers at the rally). The truck dropped him off at the pharmacy where the doctor works and we waited for him to get there. Once he arrived he gave the bolo a shot of something in his butt (keep in mind that half the town was in the pharmacy watching this process, including me) and told my host dad to take him home so he could sleep it off. We did. I am still unclear as to whether we ran over him, he fell, or he was hit by a motorcycle (it turns out the guy that was claiming he said he was hit by a motorcycle was also a bolo so…who knows). I am also not sure if his leg was actually broken. I am sure I will hear more about it later, and I am sure I will see him passed out on his usual corner soon and I can check out if he has a cast or not.
So, in summary, I have had a very interesting Christmas. There have been several near disasters. The crazy thing about all of this is that it seems pretty normal to me now. Well, not normal, but less major than it would have seemed a couple months ago. If I had been in a car that could have possibly run over a man’s leg in the states, it would have been a big freaking deal. Here, not so much. It is pretty much already forgotten about. If I had seen a 12 year old run a motorcycle into a crowd of people in the states, again, it would have been a big deal. Here I just had to make sure I didn’t tell my host dad about it because he would get mad. I don’t really know if this is a good thing, or a bad thing, or just life, but I am hoping that the disasters stay minimal, especially considering I am about to go hike up a mountain for New Years. Yes, that’s right, I am climbing a mountain. Slightly different than last year’s celebration (although I might wear the same outfit…). That being said, I will probably not have cell phone service for the next couple days so, happy New Years, love you all and just think, you only have to suffer through one more holiday season sans Sarah. Try not to be too bolo this New Years, and if you are keep your legs out of the road.
ps. there are some new pictures up, enjoy
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