Will the end affect their means?

I finished my Examen de Ingles this morning and copied it to a jump drive while finishing my coffee (I make coffee in a pot, so it's 'cowboy coffee,' but I add 1/3 of the cup whole milk, which I buy from my neighbors for $.25/20 oz.). I gave the students a take-home version of their test to study, and today is the due date. I wanted to give them a chance to ask questions before their test on Wednesday. However, I never heard the typical foolery as the kids walked by my house to the school this morning, and I never heard the moto del profe (the hum of his motorcycle is our schoolbell). Apparently, school was cancelled today.

I live in a farming community, and now that we're in the rainy season, every male in my community milks the cows, eats breakfast, and then leaves the house around 7:30 with a machete, a hoe and a pick to go weed their coffee plantations or dig canals to direct the draining water. This is relevant because it means for me, that my morning plans have been cancelled, and everyone's working for the day, so I have until 3:00 PM before I can do much of anything in my community.

Some have asked how to report on how life changes with the recent coming of electricity to this small community. Life for most people has not changed drastically, but rather, it is only slowly changing. Life for me has changed drastically, because I was once used to having electricity. I come home, and even though I only have a 25 kbps internet connection through a USB modem, I immediately check facebook, hotmail, gmail, and the BBC World News. I can now pass hours organizing photos, music and old files on my computer, without worrying about battery life. I leave my cell phone on all night, just because it's easier than having to turn it on again the next morning. I read later into the night because I'm not so worried about my eyesight being ruined. And I constantly brainstorm ways in which I'll be able to get my refrigerator up the mountain (Xiah, a retired Peace Corps Volunteer, left me a knee-high refrigerator when she left).

For other people life's begun to change too, they listen to music more often now, and aren't worried about using their cell phones for playing games or listening to music, because the batteries are rechargeable. People who have TV's have gatherings to watch the newest illegally copied DVD that they bought from town, but most still can't justify sitting for more than 1 hour, and often excuse themselves during the climax of a movie. I have had one instance where someone invited me into their house, and when we ran out of things to say, instead of sitting in silence like we used to, they turned on the TV to watch telenovelas.

But mostly, we still sit around in the afternoons on the patio talking and peeling blades of grass in the awkward silences. Candle sales are surely down, as are battery sales since nobody uses flashlights anymore. In fact, most houses are lit without flashlights all through the night since, as of now, the meters have not been installed, so there is no financial motive to turn out the lights.
Electricity is certainly one of the necessary services in the modern world, but since the people here have gone for so long without it, their initial use, for the most part, is very practical. They use it for: phones, lights, hair clippers, music, and an occasional TV show.

And God saw that the light was good. --Genesis 1:4

The Peace Corps offers one of the best vacation policies I've had in any job (just not a salary for travel!). Besides practically being on vacation for a job, I get 2 days per month that I can save up and use how I want. A few weeks ago, I was euphorically dragging heavy cables through coffee plantations, across drainages, over hedges, and under an intensive heat. Euphorically because 1) the very cables that were a present burden would be a future blessing, and 2) I was one day away from heading back to the U.S.

I remained very content during a 5-hour, sweaty bus ride, a sleepless night in a hotel without AC, and a 3 ½ hour flight to Houston. And upon arrival to the U.S, my patriotism was soaring like our national bird. Then I hit customs, ha ha.

Anyway, I won't write about my trip because this blog is for those who live in the US and want to know what my small part of Honduras is all about; HOWEVER, Nate and Emily's wedding in Hawaii was unforgettable, being back in Dickinson to see my sobrinos, family and friends made it hard to leave again, and I'll sure miss my Jeep.

It was a bit tough leaving, especially to arrive in sweltering heat in San Pedro Sula to stay at the same hotel withouth AC. I instantly was hit with the realities of my life in Honduras: you can't flush your toilet paper, you get used to being sweaty all the time, you walk a lot, you keep your few possessions close, and you go a long time between accessing your Facebook!

But I was genuinely content to make it back “home,” to my cooler mountain town, to unpack all my stuff, and see that at least the neighbors already had electricity. Sadly, they waited to do my house because they didn't want to intrude while I was gone--I swear I wouldn't have minded!

I did go through some remorse for the first day or so away from the U.S. again, but in the first week since being back:
-I hiked to an undeveloped waterfall with a group of other volunteers, and then we went for a dip in a beautiful blue lagoon

-I was interrupted from digging a curb (to keep water out of my house), in order to show 11-year-old Leonardo how to butcher and prepare a domestic rabbit (everyone LOVED my cooking!)

-I ate a whole pound of mamones, tropical grapes, or whatever you call these wonderful fruits that are in season now

-I helped herd an escapee pig back to its corral (it was eventually carried back, SCREAMING, by it's two ears an it's tail)

-I tried to convince the school president to release the house wren fledgelings that she'd captured AND...

-I finished wiring my house! I cannot explain the feeling of gratefulness that comes to me just walking back and forth between rooms in my house looking at the lights, even when it's light outside. After months of living with only a solar panel to charge my phone, I still feel rushed to use the electricity before the clouds come out.

<---- doesn't my house look content now?

Not yet a rainy day

(Old news: The last pictures I put up on Facebook were with a connection too slow to add descriptions. The student elections were to form a student government which will help organize all the festivities of the schoolyear as well as see to complaints of other students. The other photos were of processing sugar cane. This process takes almost a whole day, and because all the kids knew to come to dip wooden spoons in the foam so they could lick the cachasa, it was a very festive event.)

Today while brushing my teeth, washing my towel or washing dishes (I can't remember which), I noticed a straight, branchless palo (tree) that I hadn't seen before through the gap in the bricks in front of my pila. There is another that stands above my neighbor's house that I now see out the window while lying in my hammock.

On Saturday, May 7th, as we wrapped up an amazing Mother's Day celebration at the school, I was eager to leave the lunch to find the source of gritando (barks, yips, whoops and hollaring learned by Honduran men sometime in boyhood used to celebrate or emphasize someone's foolishness--a direct ) from outside. However, I had a few invitations yet to extend to women who might want to enter our newly forming group that will soon be selling canned vegetables in the markets of towns down the mountain.

After finishing a large plate of fried chicken, cabbage and potato salad, tortillas and rice, and cleaning the walls of mother's day decor, I snuck out while some were still chatting to see where all the men were from the community; I could still hear them whooping nearby. What I saw nearly silohetted by a sinking afternoon sun was strikingly like the statue to Iwo Jima. Over 20 men were gathered in a tight band lifting a pole high over their heads, and after a few minutes when it fell into an 8' deep hole, the shouts erupted again. I helped lift poles for the remainder of the afternoon, and what we accomplished was to give the appearance of a town that almost has electricity. So that's the big news in Sinacar; they say by the end of the month, there will be streetlights in a town that's never had electricity apart from solar panels, alternators, gas-powered generators, and batteries. I'm worried Peace Corps won't feel so much like camping anymore.

This season in my part of Honduras the Cucunachinas (sp? june bugs) are hatching like crazy and each evening you hear sounds like rain on the zinc roofs. Subsequently, each morning you feel somthing like autumn leaves beneath your flip-flops, as their lifespan appears to be one night. The warblers and many raptors have migrated north now; so I suppose you're all enjoying new signs of Spring back home. It's still summer here, and has been since I arrived apart from a brief spell in Nov-Dec that kinda felt like fall. However, this is the dry season, and sometime in May the rain normally falls, so I expect that shortly I will pull the rubber boots out of the corner. I suspect that when it's pouring rain here and 70 degrees and sunny back in North Dakota, my friends and family will finally have a one up on the weather! At least I will still have mangoes, platanos, bananas and a wonderful neighborhood of friends here to not become over nostalgic!

I'll try to write more faithfully; especially once I have an outlet!

The absurdities of age and I.Q.

One of the biggest religious epiphanies in my time since entering the Peace Corps is that everything, even my understanding of age is based upon a U.S. norm. I noticed it at first shockingly as I saw 12-14 year old girls pregnant in a small town just outside of Tegucigalpa. The next shock was during a school enrollment census, while copying names and ID numbers of parents, I learned the ages of some of my community members (their birth year is part of their ID number). One gray-haired and almost hobbling man, I discovered, was born only a few years before my Dad. (Is my Dad that old?) And since then continually observing parents, who seem older than me, but have birth years later in the 1980's than mine. So I've realized that even age and our simplest views are constructed based upong where we live.

Yesterday while walking back from planting a school garden a half hour or so up the mountain, I was not very surprised when the profesor (who always points out attractive girls asking, "how about her?") asked me if I noticed that beautiful, skinny babe (I don't really know an appropriate translation for the word he used, jodida). He was talking about Edina, a 17-year-old! I mentioned that dating such a young girl would pose legal problems for a U.S. citizen, but he dismissed this, "Who would ever know?" And for his credit, he's not a chauvanistic pig, it's just the local view on age. A marriage between a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl is a practical bond that happens here because by 30, a man has established himself with land, a house, and likely a car, and by 16, a girl has completed all the education she'll probalby complete, and is in her adult stage of life.

And while planting that garden, I also realized that the kids, though at education levels 3-4 years behind U.S. standards, already know how to construct plant beds for starting lettuce plants on the side of ridiculously steep slopes. They also knew the germination and production times for raddishes, green beans, lettuce, squash and mustard greens. Most of us in the U.S. don't learn to plant a garden until well into our 30's, or even later in more urban areas.

Life is different here. Boys graduate 6th grade when they're 12 years old (if their parents think school is worth the time), they begin working in the fields full time, they build your own shack and start to develop it into a house, and if they're lucky, they marry and move into it before turning 18. In the U.S. an 18-year-old is still in high school! In the U.S. we'd still have four years of college before we think about settling down. But the structure of our education system really affects our view of maturity. We consider a person not mature enough to drink until they're 21, but here, by 21 you can be president of the city council, father of 5 kids, owner of your own house and farmland, and by all means fully independent.

And I think people physically age differently too. By 50 years old, most men in my community look to be in their 70's. However, those who live to their 70's are agile old farts who still carry 100 lb. bags of coffee on their backs and walk a few miles a day to and from their farmlands. And certainly a 20-year old girl with two kids has physically matured faster.

Also, although I feel incredibly smart at meetings where everone, in order to read a handout outlining their budget, has to read slowly and outloud to make sense of the words on a page; I feel incredibly stupid when standing in the back of a truck trying to figure out how we're going to fasten 3 15-foot pvc pipes to a pickup without a rack and up comes Pedro with a short piece of rubber from a bike innertube, a wire flag and a few green palm branches and tightens things as if he had a ratchet strap. I may be resourceful with Google, but he's resourceful in his pickup box. And so, though a 13-year-old boy may have learned the vast majority of what he needs to know to produce a coffee crop, I find myself enlightening 75-year-olds by showing them that the U.S. and Canada share a border, or that plants 'inhale' carbon dioxide and 'exhale' oxygen.

As such, with so many interesting variations of correlations between age and types of intelligence, I have realized that perhaps, though still shocking and apalling to me, I can understand why it's not weird for so many 16-year-olds to be pregnant by a husband who's lived twice as long.

A monkey I saw on a recent trip to the north coast.


my new home!

“I look to the sea. Reflectoins in the waves spike my memory—some happy some sad. I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had. We lived happily forever, so the story goes, but somehow we missed out on the pot of gold, but we'll try best that we can to carry on.”

After months of living in a country where I “sailed away on an open course full of urgency,” I've found myself during quiet nights in my house reflecting on the life I've left behind. Perhaps because I read Garrison Keilor's Lake Wobegon Days, or perhaps it was seeing my sister's album of Christmas pictures on Facebook, but the past few weeks I've lived full of reminiscing. And unlike the song's lyrics, I don't think I ever missed out on any pot of gold.

When I was five, or so, I prayed to God, tested God, to design a rainbow with it's end in my backyard, so that I could find the pot of gold. I remember sometime later when disappointingly, I remembered my prayer and realized it hadn't been answered. But over the years as I have relived those wonderful years of my childhood, I think I've realized where God hid my treasure.

And so, living here in Honduras, thousands of miles and hundreds of degrees (Fahrenheit) from where I grew up, I catch myself (while watching kids poke at frogs or prove their “adulthood” by eating raddish greens) remembering yellow minnow buckets full of critters, puckered cheeks full of rhubarb, and nan king cherries.

Boyhood is somewhat different here. It's more like what I imagine boyhood was like for my dad. The 3 and 4-year-olds get up at 5AM to go milk the cows with their dads because “they're men.” Six to 12-year-olds despise 5AM. And by 16, they're helping to build the neighbor's house, planting their own plots of land. Most familys here don't have outhouses, nor snow to walk through to get to the outhouses, but like my dad's family, the kids here will someday remember when they got their first TV, computer, lights, etc...

Children here are more respectful than kids in the U.S. because they have to salute their elders--especially Godfathers and grandfathers whom they salute with both palms placed together in a praying position. The elders usually bend down to clasp both of their own hands around the child's, and in so doing, give their blessing. However, I may have caught the tail end of that tradition, as several families no longer participate.

And the poor little girls in this machismo culture, they practically think it's funny when I say hi to them, or make eye contact, or pay any attention to them. They're just girls. But that too is changing, and hopefully the women's groups that seem to be forming here will help to speed their women's liberation movement. I never thought I'd care about “women's lib,” it used to bug me how adamant people were about such stuff, but after a step back in time, I've realized how suppressing life can be for a female when they are only expected to cook tortillas. And not that I'd even look down on having separate rolls (working man/domestic wife) except that I've realized that, at least here, all the intelligence rests in the heads of women (for guys it's not cool to do well in school, so they don't, learn). As such, it's as frustrating as can be to go to meetings without secretaries who can write or treasurers who can keep the books; meanwhile there are women in this community who've went to high school for accounting, women here who can write, legibly!

But adulthood will be different for this crop of kids who race bike inner-tubes down the road with forked twigs, the kids who come to church with burns on their faces from New Years' Eve fireworks, and the kids who know how to “gritar” (shout out or howl) as if to prove they were still very much alive. Their kids will have TV, and likely Facebook.

Some things I wish would never come here. At least personally, I think I'd trade electricity for the views of the night sky you get here. (Only I wish my laptop had a 30-hour battery instead of 6.) And although I don't mind candles, I sure hope I am not ruining my vision squinting so often in the near darkness! TV will really change people here too. They're probably not going to listen to Radio America much more after TV arrives. And the kids will probably start listening to Regaton instead of Ranchero.

But perhaps also they'll learn to speak more grammatically correctly, and perhaps they'll learn where Canada or Europe is. Perhaps they'll see that not all Americans are white! Some of the perceptions from so close to the U.S, living where many men have worked for a few years in the U.S., are so far off. I guess that's why one goal of the Peace Corps is to encourage cultural exchange. I guess maybe it's even sadder how we in the U.S. have just as many misconceptions of a country so nearby, and we have Google!

The coffee is quite ripe for the picking here and now. The prices are good these days, up to 6500 Lempiras for a large carga (over $1.50/lb), and everyone seems to be sporting new jeans and button-up American Eagle shirts. All the kids are constantly eating 'churros' or small 10 cent bags of chips sold out of 'truchas' (the front windows of someone's house who sells snacks and laundry soap). It's easy for me to get rides down the mountain, because they can only carry 8-10 bags of coffee in the backs of their toyota or nissan trucks, and that leaves room for a couple people.

Christmas was fun here. I sat outside on a friend's patio and stared at a campfire while eating macatamales (a combination of white corn meal, beans, peppers, onions, and pork rolled up in a corn husk or banana leaf and boiled) and drinking Tecate. We walked to the church where “they celebrate until at least midnight,” but they were already leaving at 9:20. Christmas day we rested, spending much time in hammocks, reading, and picking radishes. I wasn't too homesick, because it felt like the beginning of August. New Year's was less fun because nobody did anything. I did enjoy the rest, but for the first time in years I couldn't keep awake till midnight. Of course, my real holiday comes on the 15^th when my parents arrive to visit.

I hope (especially you who've read this far!) had a marvellous Christmas filled with family traditions and food, oh the foods of Christmas! I hope you got kissed at midnight on New Years and are still holding to your list of resolutions. But mostly, I hope you didn't take for granted those immaculate lists of top stories, top photos and top people of the decade. I got a short list, in Spanish of course, from a newspaper here, and I suddenly missed MSN, New York Times and NPR.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Here are a few pictures to show the people I'm working with, the beautiful resources I'm helping to conserve, and some of the negative effects of making a living.

So up until now—a paragraph summary: I arrived in Houston, TX late on June 20th for a briefing with 57 other volunteers who were headed to Honduras. One the 22nd, we flew to Tegucigalpa and moved in with host families near Valle de Angeles, about 30 minutes from Tegus. We received language, security, and health classes for a month before dividing into training for each of our three projects. We in Protected Areas Management went to La Cuesta, a small two-road town northeast of Comayagua (the original capital of Honduras), where we lived with a second host family and trained on watershed management (building latrines to trap fecal matter, reducing agrochemicals, planting grasses and trees that reduce erosion and filter contaminants), forest management (reforestation ideas, improved wood-cooking stoves to reduce use of firewood, and fire regimes), as well as waste management. After two months, we returned to our first host families near Valle de Angeles where we had a final week of lectures on crime, disease, depression and other threats we may encounter. We also had our final language interviews to assure we could communicate on our own. To close training, at the US Embassy we swore in to service (became actual volunteers), the same day we met with our job counterparts who'd traveled to meet us. The following day we traveled with our counterparts to our respective sites where we'd be working for the next two years.

Now, I'm in Sinacar, trying to figure out what it is exactly a volunteer is supposed to be doing. After the school year let out, I have been spending much of my time doing manual labor in the coffee and bean fields. This is not a sustainable effort, but it helps to build confidence with the community and to understand what practices the farmers are using.

The big news, I am now living solo in my own rented house (I'll put up photos next time). The host family where I was living uses their house for de-kerneling corn, and storing beans, so they had hinted since I moved in that after my first two months there was an empty house nearby (PC volunteers have to live with a host family for the first two months in their sites to encourage integration). And empty it was. I borrowed a bed, a dresser, a few plastic patio tables, three plastic patio chairs, and a broom when I first moved in. And now after going in on a gas stove and a few shelves, I can survive pretty well. Not to mention, the other volunteers who donated a hammock, a solar shower, a few boxes of mac and cheese, tea, among other goodies.

I think the solar panel that my mom sent me has arrived in the PC office, so when I get that, hopefully I will have more time on my cpu to write emails and blog updates. Until then, peace out.

Settling in...

It's been over a month now that I've been living in my tiny, lightless community in the mountains of western Honduras. I bought myself a cowboy hat and tall rubber boots to fight the sun on sunny days and the mud on rainy days, but I still don't really fit in with all the campesino coffee farmers.

Sincacar is a pueblo that lies mostly on a finger ridge stretching down from the mountains in the Guisayote Protected Area. Houses rise off the ridge in clusters and it reminds me of the plates on the back of a stegasaurus toy of my 3-year-old host brother. Only the sides of the ridge are a patchwork of corn and bean patches, and all different aged coffee fincas (the older fincas are beneath the shade of Guamo and Trumpet trees, the younger fincas are naked so that the sun can quicken the growth of new trees). I've visited most of the homes now, after helping with a census of all the homes that have children for next year's school year, and about 1/3 are fairly clean and well-kept, and 2/3 are plain adobe or mud homes with rusting tin roofs and crudely formed cooking stoves that use too much firewood. But the quality of life is phenomenal. Families spend 4-6 hours together every evening, community meetings being a form of entertainment, draw people from all sides of the mountain, and the rest of the time is passed with playing cards and a crude form of Rummy. I'd prefer spades or Pinochle, but it takes me a while to teach new games, and they prefer to stick to their traditional "Con Quien."

In the beginning, other than spending lots of time visiting with as many people as possible, I'm spending lots of my time in the school. The students and parents want me to teach English, so I am, but because most of the 1-3rd graders can only read bits and pieces of Spanish, I'm sneakily spending 3/4 of my time working with Spanish. And while I teach words and phrases in English to the 4-6th graders, I'm learning lots of new vocabulary, including, as you could imagine, the local street words. As my Spanish improves I plan to do more and more teaching of natural sciences, and hopefully I can implement the environmental education curriculum that has been developed for HN.

I also plan on working with local NGO's who are located in cities down the mountain, to try to be a ambassador between the community and NGO's. I think there is a big disconnect in the ideas of each. I also think the NGO's have the funds that might help to accomplish projects that could really help: irrigation, construction of more efficient, improved stoves, etc...

I am sorry if I've been slow to keep in touch, I think that's the toughest part of living without electricity, the batteries in my cpu and cell phone are always dead. I'll hopefully be better able to keep in touch if I get the mini solar panel my mom has sent, and possibly a wireless modem from a local phone company.

Love and miss you all!