Living alone?

When I moved into my house a couple of weeks ago, some of the excitement of living alone had worn off and, thus, my first night was passed in a state of melancholy. However, my spirits began to pick up again as soon as I ate my first piece of whole wheat toast with peanut butter rather than a plate full of fried plantains topped with cabbage or that dreaded bowl of soup chock full of plantains, potatoes, cassava, rice, pasta, and another unknown bland carbohydrate.

Ironically, I seem to have less privacy now than when I lived with a host-family. Unless I hermitically seal the house and otherwise pretend that I’m not there, I have visitors. They come in the front, they come in the back, and they peer in the windows. Some are genuinely interested in visiting while others are just nosy. The latter kind just wanders in and starts looking around. There is also that breed of visitors that I am wholly unaccustomed to – the mute loiterers. Seemingly contented by my mere presence, they silently follow me around as I continue to uncomfortably go about my tasks as if they were not there.

My neighbors surpass the limits of any kind of friendly-neighbor scale. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately (I haven’t yet decided), they have chosen to express their kindness almost entirely in the form of food. The first night my landlord gave me around 5 pounds of potatoes. On the second night, when they discovered that I wasn’t making tortillas, they disappeared and came back with two, which quickly turned into a steady flow. I now have tortillas coming at me from all sides. The grandmother was thrown into a tizzy when she realized I also wasn’t eating beans and she herself presented me with my own personal pot. They make sure to check up on my egg supply and they’ve given me more than enough tomatoes and green peppers. I think they’re afraid that I may very well starve on their watch so they’re watching very closely. I even caught grandma peering in my window more than once.

My neighbors aren’t the only ones giving me food either. I’ve been given an entire head of lettuce, a squash, two ears of corn, eggs, and cassava. On one day alone I was given four pieces of cake, four plantains and two tamales. Really, it’s too much food for one person to consume. I actually attempted to give the corn away to a needy family and instead they just cooked it for me on the spot.
The squash recently went bad and, because I felt guilty about wasting food, I attempted to dispose of it by throwing it into the trees behind my house under the cover of night so that no one would notice. Unfortunately, I threw it straight into a wet towel which I didn’t see in the dark, making a huge racket in the process. Part of the squash stuck to the towel and half of it ricocheted back onto the house. I ended up having to wash the towel and the house to dispose of the evidence. I never found the other half.

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One of my neighbors recently complemented me on my pee bucket which I had left outside to dry. She literally told me how nice it was and started estimating how much it must have cost me. It wasn’t until I caught myself telling her that I thought the color was really nice that I realized how absurd the conversation was to begin with.

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Some young boys (third grade and younger) paid a visit and told me that they liked my ponchito. Maicol, the 4 year old that has a crush on me told on them. I had to ask him for clarification because I didn’t know what that word meant. He pointed to his crotch and told me they were malcriados (badly behaved.) Obviously, it means vagina. Honestly?! They are in primary school!

More Pictures from Site

I posted several more pictures from my site and the surrounding area. To check them out look in the Honduras folder!

Moving Out

I think that it would be difficult to convey just how ready I am to live without a host-family. I'm oh so ready. It will be a welcome change after living with host-families for more than two and a half years. Currently I'm on host-family number 8, if you include when I studied abroad. I could probably write a book about living with host-families by now, not that I'm any kind of expert. It takes a certain personality to make it effortless. In my case, it has never been effortless.

My current host-family is great. But perfection is hard to come by in a host-family. My host-father, for example, likes to blare reggaeton right on the other side of my wall. He gets really enthusiastic about his favorite songs and turns the volume up several notches with each favorite song. He has a lot of favorite songs. Of course, he also never turns the volume down so that, after about three of his favorite songs have come on, the house is practically shaking. My host-mother is a great cook, but, like most Hondurans, she's a big fan of the manteca (congealed vegetable oil that comes in disconcertingly large tubes.) It says cholesterol free on the outside of the package but that's not fooling me. It seems to be reusable and any food product that's reusable can't be healthy.

Luckily, I found a house to rent in El Sauce, which was no easy feat given the general lack of houses. Someone recommended that I live in one of the two houses which were recently abandoned - abandoned because the men from my site who were murdered lived in them. Instead, I'll be living in the house of a young bachelor, who decided he would rent to me after I explained that I would only be renting it for 10 months. He chuckled and said that he didn't want to commit to renting for any longer than a year because, goodness, what would he do if he found a cute cipota (young girl) that he wanted to robar (steal/marry)?!

The house is certainly nice by my community's standards, nicer than most of the houses, with cement floors, a shower, doors and windows. However, it's basically the one of only two houses that meets the Peace Corps security standards. My host-family doesn't seem to care that it is a completely secure house and can't fathom a single female living by herself. Proudly, they seem to have resolved this issue by reassuring themselves that they will just send my 10 year-old host-sister to live with me when I move out. While this is a perfectly normal custom in Latin America, I find the prospect none too thrilling. I just hope they’ve forgotten within the next two weeks!

Clandestine Photos

I finally got around to taking a few snapshots of my site, although I will admit that I've been afraid to take pictures for fear that my camera will be stolen which is most likely a ridiculous notion in El Sauce. I'll try to take some better pictures soon.

Stream of Consciousness

“Va a llover” literally translates to, "It's going to rain." It is also, without a doubt, the most commonly spoken phrase in my community. Since it rains all the time, I erroneously took the expression literally and was, for the first two weeks in El Sauce, perplexed by the frequency with which people commented about the impending rain, especially when it was already raining. I was also confused every time the expression was repeated multiple times within the same conversation or when someone randomly said it was going to rain while talking about a completely unrelated topic.

I still don't know what “va a llover” really means, but I finally figured out that it is not referring to rain. My host-mom couldn't really explain what it meant either, but she got a big kick out of the fact that I had interpreted it literally. She attempted to clarify the meaning by saying "va a llover" multiple times in a row. My best guess is that it means something like "whatever" or "yeah right."

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Time is certainly fluid in El Sauce. While conducting household surveys one elderly woman of 76 told me she was 50. Her daughter-in-law corrected her, informing me that her id card placed her at 76, to which the woman stubbornly replied that she thought it must be incorrect because she was most certainly in her fifties. Another woman, age 79, told me that she’d been living in El Sauce for a mere 3 years. Her son just laughed and said, amused, “Three years?! At least forty!”

Another man who was attempting to guess my age said, "You guys are just so big that it's hard to guess your ages." He guessed my age to be around 17.

Sadly, I also misjudged two teenage boys, age 14 and 15, to be around 7 and 9. They come from the poorest family in town and the only explanation for their small size is malnutrition. I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it but it’s just not right.

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I encountered a 10 year-old girl with her own bottle of Boone's Farm which she proudly showed me. She offered a taste as well. Her mom was right there and didn't seem to think anything of it.

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My host-family unabashedly asked me to tell them English slang words for vagina. Under pressure, I only managed to come up with three: cherry, fish taco and axe wound. Unfortunately, I translated them into Spanish.

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By the end of one year here I am predicting that I will have been converted into a devout Catholic or Evangelical either because of the sheer number of prayer services I will have attended or because the crime rate will have convinced me that prayer is our only salvation. It's a pretty close toss-up between the two. My current activities include the Wednesday prayer group, Friday night rosary, and Sunday mass. I’ve also been invited by the evangelicals to attend “the cult” which, while it sounds a little frightening to me, is literally what they call it. So far I’ve managed to avoid “the cult” but I’ve promised to go next Wednesday.

As for the crime rate, it's rather alarming. The murder rate is at about 67 people per 100,000 which is really high. Consider that in Peru it's at 2 per 100,000. Obviously, some of the crime is localized to the bigger cities, especially around San Pedro Sula where there is a lot of gang activity due to the cocaine trade. However, crime extends pretty much throughout the entire country. Guns abound and Hondurans take the law into their own hands because of a non-functional and corrupt legal system. The school director comfortingly put it to me that he could kill me on the spot with my host-sister watching and nothing would happen to him as long as he paid off the lawyers.

The subject arose because two weeks ago at 2:30 on Saturday morning, 4 local men, 2 from my site, were forcefully taken from their homes, shot numerous times in the head and left in a cornfield in a neighboring community. The story goes that men in police uniform came to their homes and claimed they were taking them in for investigation, which was plausible because that actually happened to 9 other people the week before. All of the men who were shot, as well as the men taken into custody the previous week, were members of a local gang who for the last couple of years has been robbing people and delivery trucks and possibly killing.

The bodies were never taken to the morgue and were buried the very next day so you can imagine that any kind of investigation will be rather limited in scope. No one knows who is responsible for the deaths but people refer to them as either the “Death Squad” or the “Gang of the Grey Truck.” Personally, the first name instills a little bit more fear in me than the latter. It is also possible that the police were actually responsible. The lack of legal recourse is, to me, possibly the saddest part of the entire situation. Local people have expressed opinions ranging from sadness and fear to relief. Several people commented to me that they got their just desserts. Clearly, no one wants the threat of a local gang hanging over their heads but I still can't help but thinking that the situation could have been resolved more peacefully. One of the people killed was only 19 and all of them had children.

Two weeks later, some people are still fairly shaken up by what happened. One man told me that he and his four brothers are so concerned that they’ve been sleeping outside for part of every night. I’m not really sure what their logic is but obviously they don’t feel safe. I’m not sure I blame them either given the incompetent, by all appearances, local police force. I recently witnessed them on patrol blaring, “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Nelly – not exactly a confidence booster. At 11:00 PM the other night they went on patrol and blasted off several gunshots at random intervals just to let people know they were patrolling. Not surprisingly, this had the opposite of a calming effect and only served to frighten the people more.

Reject Rides

Transportation to and from my site is provided by a fleet of 3 rickety, reject school buses from the States. The bus-of-choice to get from my site to Santa Barbara is light blue, from Portland and currently out of service. None of the buses actually depart from my site, but usually a truck is sent up to take people down in order to catch the bus. However, on Thursday, I awoke at 5:15 in the morning to wait in a dark, cold rain for a truck that never came. Thankfully, it came the following morning or I might have walked down the mountain.

After leaving my site at 5:45, we made it to Santa Barbara at 8:30 am. In terms of distance, it's really not that far from my site to Santa Barbara, nor is the road that bad. However, it is precisely the kind of road that sane people would never venture to take a school bus down, especially not one filled beyond capacity.

That said, I am under the impression that most bus drivers are simply not sane. I'm still not sure what my parents were thinking putting me on the school bus each morning as a child. As I recall, those one hour bus rides through the Illinois countryside were cause for concern - veritable roller-coaster rides sans seatbelts. The best seats were at the back, where a hill would send you flying into the air. I wouldn't be surprised if the bus even got air. Of course, if the school district had screened its drivers, the rides would have been less eventful. I remember one of our drivers was frequently late and once he just didn't show. He was promptly fired, as the bus company finally realized that he was a drug addict. There was also Carl, the man who drove us to school for several years. I suspect that Carl took up school bus driving as a hobby in his retirement years because he must have been in his seventies and his glasses were thicker than the windshield. Carl alternated between reading the bible and the dictionary. His favorite refrain, always shrieked, was, "Get your seat of the pants on the seat of the bus." Despite his obvious lack of vision, he drove that bus like a race car driver. I recall that once, during the same ride, he took out one of the middle side windows with a tree branch and later backed into a huge oak tree that a blind person could have avoided. Nonetheless, for kids on a country school bus, these rides were just normal.

Much as the school bus ride was for me, for most of the passengers, particularly the elderly gentlemen, the ride to Santa Barbara was like a jovial social hour. I enjoyed the ride, despite being a little squished, by taking in the beautiful view - a mix of forest, coffee farms and cornfields. A mere 3 hours after arriving in Santa Barbara, I resumed the bus ride again to return to my site, arriving at 2 pm.

Back to Square One

I arrived at my new site, El Sauce, on Friday afternoon to find that, indeed, there are no willows in El Sauce. However, from my backyard there is a clear view up into the cloud forest of Santa Barbara National Park. The scattered houses of El Sauce dot the hillside along the edge of the nuclear zone of the park, with farm plots creeping upwards, creating a clearly discernable line between the remaining cloud forest and development as El Sauce knows it.

My new house is nice by my standards, with an indoor bathroom, tile floors, windows with screens, couches and no holes in the walls. There are also no rats running across the rafters like there were in my first house in Huaca Rivera. It is certainly one of the nicer homes in town. My bedroom is, however, roughly the size of my laundry room in the States, with less storage space and entirely occupied by an enormous queen-sized bed.

Of course, my new home also includes a new host-family – two parents, two girls (10 and 5 years old) and a baby boy. Everyone in the family is very nice and the girls are particularly calm. The 5 year old does, however, have the particular habit of racing to finish her food before me every time we eat which is a little alarming because, while she does a fairly impressive job, it always ends in a few disconcerting gasps for air.

Honestly, this family is pretty hands-off and understanding in terms of allowing me to maintain a certain level of independence. After having lived with about 8 different host-families, I’ve learned how to make myself at home pretty much instantly. Nonetheless, it is never really that comfortable. Once again I’ve reverted to feeling a bit like a child. For example, I now have shiny pink toenails complete with floral decorations courtesy of my host-mom. I’ve never had decorations on my toenails, but she insisted.

Also, the other day I wanted to go for a run so I asked my host-mother where exactly I could run. She informed me that I could either run up or down the hill, with the condition that if I ran down the hill I could only run as far as a certain concrete fence. I opted to run down the hill, assuming that the fence would be a reasonable distance away. Well, as soon as I left my house I could already see the fence and I arrived at said fence approximately 30 seconds later, probably less. So, I turned around to run up the hill which was around a curve and, thus, not readily visible. The top of the hill was roughly 15 seconds from my house. It was quite the run.

Amazingly, my host-mom gave me the option of preparing my own breakfast. Nonetheless, when I asked to borrow a pan to fry an egg she took it upon herself to add about ½ cup of oil. I actually tried to get her to take some out and she simply replied that the extra oil would remain in the pan once the egg was cooked. Then she cooked the egg while spooning copious amounts of the extra oil on top of the egg. Indeed, some oil remained in the pan but at least half was absorbed and, therefore, ingested.

Also, along with living with a host-family comes the usual slew of awkward questions: Do you believe in God?, Why don’t you eat meat?, You know that our meat is healthier?, Why won’t you at least try this endangered armadillo?, How much did that box of tea cost? Of course, even if that box of tea cost $6.00, once converted to Lempiras, it might as well have cost you $100 because that’s what it seems like to them.

In terms of work, I’m back to square one, with nothing to do. Hopefully I don’t go crazy because I’m not sure I can handle the lack of productivity again. I saw my counterpart at the Sunday church service and asked when the next water board meeting would be. Since he is on the board and my counterpart for precisely that reason, I assumed it were logical that I would attend. He was like, “Oh, I doubt you’d want to go.” As I suspected I would be, I’m concerned that this site has not been developed at all in terms of PC site development.