Just a quick note before we go...

Well, I'm paying for 30 minutes of internet use, so I might as well put it to good use, right? The remaining 10 minutes are as good a time as any to blog.

Alex & I are now at Hostel Tamarindo in San Pedro Sula, getting ready to meet our cab at 4 AM tomorrow morning. Our host assures us that we've booked a good cab driver and he should actually show up.

Meanwhile, we had a few hours of daylight to kill, so, as is our style when in a new city, we went for a stroll. Would we find someplace to eat? A mercado (supermarket) or a pulperia (small store, maybe like a convenience store, but not really)? We wandered around a bit, checked out some food places, got kicked out of the university (I guess foreigners are allowed in the high-walled, guarded University of San Pedro Sula), then settled on Baleada Express - Honduran fast food - yum. As any good Honduras traveller knows, baleadas are a staple of Honduran food. They consist of smashed beans, cheese sauce that is somewhat similar to runny sour cream, cheese crumbles similar in taste to goat cheese all on a folded flour tortilla. Sometimes, they have other things inside such as eggs or tomatoes. They are cheap just about everywhere. As usual, strangers in a strange land result in an unusual experience, especially for those who are unaccustomed to eating fast food in the first place. We had to have the cashier speak veerry slloowwlllyyy for us. I took our horchatas to the table and waited for Alex and the food. And waited. And watched music videos. He finally discovered that the ticket that the cashier had handed to him did not have some magic number that would be called when his order was filled but actually had to be handed to the prep cook in order to get the food made. Do you ever feel like you're being stared at all of the time? Ah well, it happens. So we ate, Alex his baleada with chorizo, me my platos tipicos (typical plate of Honduran food) and headed back to the hostel before dark fell.

Wish us luck on the early rising tomorrow!

Surreal moments in Copan Ruinas

The center of Copan Ruinas, much like a European predecesor, consists of a town square, replete with non-functional water fountain, Mayan sculptures, the requisite church, a museum, and food hawkers. It is a place to hang out, buy ice cream, sit and enjoy the sun (or shade, depending on how hot it is), and sometimes the entertainment. Since we've been here, we've wandered through the town square every weekend to find some sort of activity going on. From the very well attended church function to the visit from the President who was handing out money (but didn't actually show up) to the telephoneless telethon to raise money for something for children's heart issues, we've wandered through an amazing array of activities. Last night was the one, the amazing, the Coca-Cola Feliz Navidad show.

The show was supposed to start at 4 PM, we heard. Having learned the realities of punctuality in Honduras, we arrived at 4:30 to a stage still being set up. Alex enjoyed the recorded music over the loudspeakers, but I promptly grew restless and wandered the 2 blocks back home to make a rice and cheese dinner. Returning 45 minutes later, I was just in time for the opening act. A little Jose Feliciano, anyone? No? Well, how about Michael Jackson instead? Apparently, MJ is huge in Honduras, a little known fact that I was unaware of. I wonder how impressed my students, to whom I have yet to reveal my true age, would be if they knew that I grew up with Michael Jackson. I was still a kid when the big "Thriller" dance video first hit MTV. I remember the white glove, the moonwalk. So, now we are here in Honduras listening to "Billy Jean." The band moved on to Spanish songs, then the show moved on to events for kids. Santa arrived and threw candy, some girl got a big gift basket, and lots of kids got bottles of Coke. A dance troup came out, highlighting, of all things, Michael Jackson songs. (Just a minute, didn't MJ endorse Pepsi? Was that just a bad memory?) The mime, the real magician (the most magical being that I was actually able to understand a lot of what he said), and I was about to call it quits when the band returned and an excellent gentleman singer came out and started singing real Spanish language Christmas Carols. "Tuki tuki tuki tuki" had a familiar ring to it, as well as "We wish you a Merry Christmas," as we'd just sung those in the Christmas parade (although I admit, I was prone to ignoring the signing during all of the rehearsals as I had my mind on lesson plans and quizzes I was going to squeeze in before the holiday break). The singer sang a little while, involving audience members young and old, once asking if everyone in the audience spoke English ("Yes!" I wanted to shout from the back of the crowd, "I speak English! I know the words to 'We Wish you a Merry Christmas!'"). When he left for a little break, a violinist came out, playing, to Alex's delight, some latin music that eventually sequed into Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" and we descended into Surreal Honduras of unknown time, unknown place, where we are somehow still just another brick in the wall. We accomplished a major first here in Copan Ruinas. I have never heard Pink Floyd played on the violin. Mostly Pink Floyd with hints of Charlie Daniel's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." After that, because who can top that?, the singer came back out to join the violinist and the band, and, finally, sang Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad," which, thanks to last week's caroling, we now know the words to. He then sang a couple of songs we didn't know. Finally, for an encore, the bass player suggested the extremely appropriate and seasonal cheery favorite, the Spanish version of "Oh Where, O Where Can My Baby Be" (aka "Last Kiss"). You know the song, first sung by Dion and The Belmonts, then revived by Pearl Jam, where the singer's girlfriend dies in a car crash and he prays to be good so he can see her again in heaven. Surreal Honduras. That's what it is.

It is worthy to note that Alex and I are quite good at getting ourselves into situations where there are likely to be famous people that we are completely incapable of recognizing, thus leading to things like Amy insulting Vanilla Ice the last time we went to Costa Rica. I'm guessing the singer and the violinist are actually famous in Honduras, but we have no way of knowing if they are.

Merry Christmas!

It is definitely the holiday season in Copan Ruinas! Fake Christmas trees and lights have been appearing in houses. The Parents Association held its annual Bingo fundraiser. I didn't win anything, but took advantage of the great opportunity to practice my Spanish numbers. Hallie, a teacher from Tennessee, won a sheep, who is now being moved from lawn to lawn at the school to act as lawn mower and fertilizer.


The next big event was the school Christmas play. The primary students sang in the choir and the 10th and 11th graders acted out the play. The play was very educational about Honduran customs. The female conductor welcomed the audience and asked for quiet in a beautiful, but see-through shirt, with lace covering the important areas. The very accepted style here was astonishing to the US teachers. The lights dimmed, the first song began, and the audience kept right on with their conversations. There was a dim hum of conversation throughout the entire performance. I finally know why the 7th graders are incapable of sitting through even 5 minutes of class without chatting with their friends!


Finally, the Christmas Carol parade. After days of practice, during which 8A missed Science class and fell way behind 8B, 8B having the advantage of having science 5th period instead of 1st period, the singers were "ready". Led by my personal favorite of the show, the drum line, replete with xylophones and bass drum players that played first with the left hand, then the right, but hardly ever both at the same time, the singers followed Santa and, occassionally, sang. Also near the front of the parade was a truck carrying a nativity hut made earlier that day out of local branches and tree fronds by Alex and the high schoolers. The students, in their red shirts and neatly styled hair, with their hand-held lanterns made out of wood, colored cellophane and candles, looked beautiful. Wait! Candles? Yes, the Kindergarten through 7th grade (with one or 2 8th graders) were carrying fire. I've only heard two reports of hair being set on fire. The 7th graders somehow could not manage to keep their candles lit. Something about boys blowing out girls candles and girls blowing out boys candles. I followed up the rear of the parade with the other middle school teachers and decided not to force the 7th graders to sing, especially since the singing often took place with the front part of the parade and the guitar players (music teachers Hernan and Rudy as well as Alex and David, the webpage designer) around a corner from the rear of the parade. The 7th graders eventually tired of carrying their lanterns and took to burning and tearing the cellophane out, discarding the rubbage in the most accepted trash receptical - the street.


I, like any good science teacher, wrapped up the 3-day week before Christmas, by giving the 7th graders a quiz on Monday, the 8th graders a disastrous open book quiz on Tuesday (I unwisely let them vote for open book on Tuesday or closed book on Wednesday with 8A missing Wednesday's last Caroling rehearsal until they finished the quiz), and a chapter test for the 9th graders on Wednesday. Today, Friday, is our 2nd day of the holiday break! We'll be going to Costa Rica for Christmas to visit with some friends, Jose, Bernadette, Sophia, and Isabelle Solano, and renew our visas.


Happy Holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Escuela Mayatan honors the traditional US holiday by making us a (mostly) traditional Thanksgiving dinner (pumpkin pie with icing?) and giving us the traditional 4 day weekend. We had 2 really nice dinners with some of our new friends. Last night's dinner included some Hondurans who enjoyed their 1st Thanksgiving feast. Luis commented on how much he liked all the food, especially the 4 slivers of pie he tried.

The town, despite moving into hot & sweaty weather, is preparing for Christmas. Fake Christmas trees are popping up in living rooms (visible through doors propped open to let a breeze in) and on rooftops. Christmas decorations have appeared in stores, although, thankfully, not in the mass abundance as in US stores. Christmas turkeys have appeared in the streets. There is a particularly large and fearsome one on the road to Escuela Mayatan that is very cocky and chased Alex on Wednesday morning. He was hoping it would and I am more than happy to let him play the decoy so I can make my hurried escape.

As our 3rd week here comes to a close, I (Amy, this time) am thankful for the following things:
-I have learned how to unlock my classroom door mostly on the 1st try.
-I have learned how to turn on the shower so it is mostly warm most of the time.
-We now own 4 candles so we're more prepared the next time the power goes out.
-I am grateful that I brought my gray sweater - the first 2 weeks were a little on the chilly side.

The newest teacher, Hallie, who arrived one week after us, asked us last night, "Things get better after 3 weeks, right?" (She's actually getting along well, but we're all in the adjustment period of living in a new country.) I told her that I think that there are so many basic things that we have to learn how to do again that we take for granted in the US that of course there is an adjustment period. Opening doors, using the shower, using the toilet, buying groceries - where to find the food, what it looks like, how it's packaged (or not packaged) and how to ask for it, new food, food that is cheap here but expensive in the US (pineapples, papayas, platanos), food that is expensive here but cheap in the US (apples), where to use the Internet, doing the laundry by hand either in our shower or on the pila....

For those of you who have snow already, Alex and I celebrated our Thanksgiving holiday today by going for a hike in the jungle and adjusting to sweating. Sweating! We haven't done that for years.

Happy Turkey Day to all!

Dust and Books

It has been two weeks already with Amy finishing her second week in front of the students. Her anxiety is waning and she is doing well. The students are starting to warm up as well as they have been through a couple of teachers this season. One who didn't work out and a substitute filling in until Amy came in, so it stands to reason there will be some adjustment period. Escuela Mayatan is the only private not for profit, non religious, bilingual school in all of Honduras with 300 students and they will have their first graduating class in 2012. Every Monday morning All students and staff gather around the perimeter of the outside basketball court for an assembly to sing their national anthem, sing a song, recieve anouncements then head off to class.

The grounds here are beautiful, nestled into the side of a hill with many various tropical plants and trees. The windows on the buildings are gridded with screens and with no means to close them, so at times it can be very noisy. Espesially during shop and music classes.The cafeteria is a small walk up to and pick what you want building serving chicken, beef, pork, totillas, salad, cake, ice cream and drinks. Some days might have a bit different menu. There are some very large trees here with air plants growing on there trunks and branches. Another fun feature is the cherping of the gecko.

My first task at school, which I suggested I would do, was to clean out and organize all the books in the store room. Now, this room had text books, teachers' resource books, novels, magazines, old spiral binders with old "stuff" in them. Loose books, books in boxes, books on shelves mixed with papers, books on the floor mixed iwht papers, books in English, Spanish, even a book or two in French and German, and, what?!, even romance novels? Oh, and a couple of books the kids shouldn't be looking at. C'est la vie. So in I went.

As I dug in, I found hidden under the rubble and dust bags of Christmas decorations, years-gone-by lost and found clothing items, paper school projects and a couple of mummified tree frogs and dried beetles. One day, the librarian came in and looked through some work books and said with her Honduran accent, "My god! This was my daughter's grade school book. It has her name in it and now she is in her second year of University!"

I sorted and stacked and sometimes I sorted and stacked a stack again until I had multiple copies of the same books together and books with like books. Next, the books were surveyed and some made the grade while others received an F for being too F-outdated, too F-damaged, too F-useless, or too F-many of the same copy. We promptly stacked these books outside in the breeze way so teachers or students could gander at them to see if there was anything to their liking.

Next thing I knew, the hoards of students descended like flies on....well, you get the idea. Papers were flying, books were flying. You would have thought it was gift time at Christmas. It was a sight to behold. The kids were so excited and it looked like a hurricanito came through. Small boys had stacks of books as tall as themselves were carting them home at the end of the day. Girls put books in boxes so they could team up and each take an end to get them home. I failed to mention that within the rubble was an old fax machine, an old computer moniter, a disassembled ceiling fan and an old overhead projector. One girl asked me, referring to the fax machine, "Can I take this home?" "You need to ask your teacher. I don't think it works," I said. She replied, "I just want to play with it." Another boy took the moniter home and the disassembled fan just disappeared. By the end, all that was left were a few books that also received an F from the kids and some bags of used up paper. I enjoyed the whole ordeal. It was a treat to watch the case of the disappearing books, especially as Amy and I left at the end of one day to see one of the primary students, probably no more than 10, clutching his new Biology book.

I don't know whatever happened to the overhead projector. It was gone, then it was back, and then it was gone again.

PS Being in Honduras, our computer has automatically switched to Spanish. Google in Spanish, Blogspot in Spanish, even Spellcheck in Spanish. Please forgive our typos in an effort to get home before dark.

Churches, Restaurants and Cobblestone

Well, Amy and I are settled in our cozy one bedroom apartment. Everything here is made out of concrete, so our walls are concrete also with a cheery yellow paint job accented with blue striping bordering the baseboards and ceiling. The floors are red clay tile. The town is situated along a hill so the streets are up and down and for the most part either dirt or cobblestone. The streets are narrow, as are the sidewalks, and the traffic can be speedy, especially the three wheeled BMW mini taxis. The cobble can take a bit to get used to when walking in or across the street. We live about 4 ½ blocks from the town square and the open air market where we go for our fruits and veggies. At times there will be music in the town square along with a roaming rooster or horse. Outside the bank are about six police, half with hand held metal detectors and the others bearing their automatic rifles, but they tend to be personable and say hello as we pass by.     

Our walk to the school in the morning is a waker-upper. We have about a mile walk, half of which is uphill. We share the morning walk with many locals either walking somewhere, doing chores or just standing outside their home or place of business. Everyone is friendly and we are really getting to practice our “Buenos dias” or “ Buenas” or “Hola”.

There are many churches here in Copan Ruinas. It is nothing to have two churches within about a 1/8 of a mile of each other. The churches are, I guess you could say, open air churches. The doors and windows are kept open and the sermon and  singing is in the air. There is a church two lots down the road from our apartment. Every morning at 5:30 am, the music begins. It begins again at about 6:oo pm and lasts for about two hours,  maybe a bit more. Oh yes, and on the weekends there is an additional round at midday. Our windows are the horizontal louvered type and are not air tight, nor are the doors, so we hear everything as if we were sitting in the first row. We also have an “open air” restaurant two lots uphill from us with only outdoor seating and last night we had a special treat. Someone was having a party, so there were Mariachis playing until 10 pm. Again, we had a front row seat. We never thought we would be so special.

Actually, we are enjoying our new life here in Honduras. It is a refreshing change. We don’t understand most of the words of the songs, but they are refreshingly different. I guess you could say the air around us is alive with life. 

                                                                        

                                            

Cleaning house

It's amazing how much junk one accumulates throughout one's life. Here we are, heading to Honduras, needing to move out of our house in one week's time, faced with a household of stuff - stuff we've moved before and would be moving again except for the fact that we would have to pay to store all this stuff. (Am I starting to sound like George Carlin?) I have discovered brand new ways of thinking about all of our stuff. I've been holding onto things that I didn't really like because they're still useful. Old dishes, lamps that don't go with our furniture, damaged dolls. The useful things are getting donated. My friend Nancy came all the way from Portland to help me free some of our stuff to go onto more fruitful lives. We auspiciously burned the worn out dolls on Halloween Day, my grandmother's birthday, thanking them for their time with me. One-armed Raggedy Ann, no-hair Raggedy Ann, the eyeless, one-eared dog. Billy and his blond girlfriend went into the fire together, to be together into eternity, and promptly rolled off the log to opposite sides of the fire. Were they glad to finally be freed from each other?

Along with the junk went the cat. Dan, the vet, came over on the Day of the Dead to put him to sleep. Unfortunately, his injection tumor, the result of his 16 plus years of vaccinations, had swelled up to the size of 2 tennis balls just before our return from our road trip. He was about to enter a time of rapid decline, so this was the time for us to let him go. He's resting next to Julie, his brother who had a long and painful death a few year.

Do we realize that a lot of the stuff that we hold onto is just plain trash? Old papers, set aside to be reviewed and never looked at again. Odds and ends that creep into filing cabinets and drawers. I gave Nancy some magnets to put in the donations box, only to turn around to catch her throwing them away. Perhaps she has the better attitude. Would someone else want my garbage anyway? I'm finding easier and easier to throw stuff in the trash the closer we get to departure - we only have so much storage space and so much time. A matter of hours now, until we need to be out of the house and on the road.

In a way, it's nice to have to divest ourselves of so much accumulation in a short period of time. We're paring our lives down to 2 suitcases and 2 carry-ons. What we have becomes meaningless - what do we really need? The rest is put out to the ether, perhaps to be seen again.

Where in the World are Alex and Amy?

We made it back to Netarts. Phew. On Tuesday morning, we were just north of Phoenix. After a marathon trip of driving through Utah, Southern Idaho, Oregon, we were back at the coast. It was hard to fathom our days of sunshine could so quickly change to days of gray. We waited for the sun to rise this morning, only to realize that the daylight wasn't going to get any brighter.

Now it's packing, packing, packing. Our Moving to Honduras sale fortuitously corresponds with the Netarts Community Club's rummage sale, so I think a sign at the end of our road, directly across from the Community Club, should bring in lots of customers. Then Friday, it's off to sunny Honduras!

Rangels in Honduras

It looks like we've had a sudden change in plans for our road trip. Between Del, Alex and I, we are a constantly shifting, never quite here or there, group of travelers. Will we go to Denver, New Mexico, a Colorado ski resort, or.... Honduras? Will we ever make it back to Oregon?

Honduras??? This all started about a week before we left Yellowstone with an email from Christina, whom I worked with at Food Roots in Tillamook. The school she's working at in Honduras, Escuela Mayatan http://school.mayatanfoundation.org/, was losing 2 teachers. Knowing we were about to leave Yellowstone, would we like to come? "But, of course," we said. Why would we miss up an invitation to go work in another country, especially one where we can work on our rudimentary Spanish? Off went our resumes. The initial word was that there were teachers available who had applied at the beginning of the school year, so we put Honduras out of our mind and drove out of Yellowstone on our big US road trip, heading for South Dakota. Five days later, we thought it would be a good idea to check email, excitedly finding an email asking if we were still interested. We set up a phone interview for while we were in Denver and in cell phone range. The interview went well enough, but we were still left wondering. It sounded like there were other more promising candidates. But, good fortune was shining and we were offered positions at the school on Friday!

Our new jobs: I will be teaching science classes to middle school aged students (in English) - hooray Civil Engineering degree. Alex, in a job being created for him, will be supervising construction projects at the school and acting as a substitute teacher.

Our road trip has completely changed. We're now in Phoenix for a very short visit with Alex's family, having abandoned the plan for the big birthday party. We cut short the visit with Mame in Denver and had a much too short visit with Leslie in Santa Fe, NM. After 2 nights here, we're taking the fastest route to Oregon to pack up the house and get it ready to rent, abandoning the plan for the big birthday party. Fortunately, Del and I have been really good about celebrating Alex's 50th birthday along the way, so he may be celebrated out (ha, ha). The goal is to leave the first week in November. Phew! Our plan for now is to have a giant moving sale this coming weekend and to beg our friends to help us pack and get our remaining possessions into storage. (Please help!) If you've had an eye on any of our furniture, now's the time to take advantage of us! (Keeping in mind that we're essentially working for room and board at a non-profit school.)

Adios, for now, and I will soon be blogging from Central America.