Christmas Holidays in Honduras

Wow, three blogs in one month… I am a machine!!! This will teach me for putting it off for so long!!! Prob will happen again tho!! I definitely have not found a life long hobby in blogging… so heres hoping more than one person reads this after all the pain I go through to write this haha!!

So December 10th and 11th were full of sad sad goodbyes… after months with many a lovely person it was soooo dumb to say goodbye!! I was definitely not impressed that the group was going to change so much for the second semester!!

So I had no desire to hang around the Punt when all my good friends had left so I decided that on Friday morn I too would head off… Colleen and Erik handily decided to travel to Guatemala and so would be passing through Honduras where I was going to be staying for my Christmas break, I had decided to volunteer in a project that worked at getting kids of the street and rehabilitating them as long as their long term care… so I had bus buddies which was lovely…

Ok so the day before we left we decided as a final awesome foursome momento to make a banana bread loaf for each one of us… we whipped up a quadruple mixture of the batter and due to having only one small loaf tin we decided to make a large cake and cut that into four…well sounds like a good plan right… well NO!! because FIVE yes FIVE hrs later when I was soooo sure it must be cooked I finally took it out of the oven… in the morn when I went to cut it I found to my horror it still wasn’t cooked through… Erik had fun throwing the bottom goopy (ultra MOIST) part of the loaf at road signs on our way North…

On Fri we said goodbye…until si Dios quiere we all meet up in June in Nevada… Erik, Colleen ad I spent the next two days reminiscing the amazing semester that we had had…

The bus trip was more than interesting… the border yet again frustrating… but by far the worse part was the first bus after crossing into Nicaragua…
We were heading to a wee town called Rivas and a guy on the bus took a shine to me... he started to make some super attractive hissing noises and say things like ´Que bonita´ and ´mi amor´ I just ignored him... he asked me if I spoke spanish and I continued to ignore him... he kinda gave up but then started up again this time stroking my arm... shudder... I still ignored him...AND THEN... so gross... he gave his crotch a good and I mean good scratch and then stroked my arm with the same hand... I was so disturbed!!! But just ignored him and was extraordinarily pleased when he got off in Rivas… Any single male reading this… take it from me… NOT a way to impress the ladies!!

So I arrived in Tegucigalpa after two long days of bus travelling… found a internet café and rang the director of the home I was going to be staying at. (turns out I actually talked to his son as he was conducting a wedding) The person on the end of the phone said he was going to come and pick me up straight away and so about 20min later Georgito showed up… I got taken to the church where the director was… I was then told just to go into the wedding… I was in dirty jeans, a sweaty top, I had been travelling for two days straight… I did not feel attractive as I walked into a room of very nicely dressed people… girls all in cocktail dresses with fancy hair etc… following the wedding we went (this time with George Senior) to a birthday party… At one of his donors homes… it was a MANSION!!! so big… Honduras is one of the countries in Central America with the biggest wealth gap… very easy to see that night… Once again I was very underdressed, but everyone was super welcoming esp Pastor George and his wife… Bed was heaven that night! such a LONG day…

SO I hung out in Teguc for a few days and then was taken out to the project… it was a farm like place and had about 40 kids living on it from the ages of 7 to 21ish… The younger kids all lived on a different site in Teguc

So for the next 3 weeks I made my home on the farm… what did I do?? Some times I asked myself the same question…

I kinda hung out alot with the kids... pretty sweet really... The older ones did a lot of the organising so I kinda just did what I could to help and just tried to give the kids a bit of one on one attention... one job I had was motivating the kids to do their washing…they hated washing their clothes (by hand)… One girl who was about 7 super hated washing clothes so she once wore all her clothes out and then as one of the other smaller girls had gone o spend sometime over christmas with her family the wee girl wore out all her clothes too… No one realised for ages and when she was finally caught out she had two full days of hand washing ahead of her… poor thing… but she was so tranquila that it didn’t seem to bother her once she had started and so for the next two days there she was scrubbing her clothes singing to herself with a massive grin on her face… funny girl!!

Sometimes me and the other 2 volunteers would take the older ones into the park so they could get away from the project for a while...The kids weren’t in school as it was the holidays and so they played quite a bit, football (soccer) was a favourite… sadly no osmosis took place while watching hours of football and I still have zero skills in that area!!!

after the meals I helped with cleaning the dining room and then I also supervised the computer lab in the avos... ... at night I watched movies with the kids, I now know word for word the movies Twilight and New Moon due to watching them NON STOP for 3 weeks I really DISLIKE the Twilight series now!!, and that was pretty much it... couldnt have done it for a life time as it def didnt have enough brain stimulation but it was great for a few weeks and really cool just getting to know the kids...

in my second week there I was pretty much a full time translator for a guy from Minnisota. He comes down 3 times a year to hang with the kids for a week and loves the project but doesnt speak any Spanish, craziness!! So I translated between him and the kids and then also the directors finding out what he could do and then how he could do it... I even managed to translate a sermon to him… while the sermon was going on(the bare bones as I was trying to keep up with the pastor... Cricky my head was sore after that from thinking so hard... some ideas were super hard to express in english and my english sentence structures kept getting super muddled lol... Or I knew what the idea was in spanish but couldn't find the english word for it so would have to say...'I know we have a word for this but can't think of it... the idea though is that..." and then he would say the right english word an I would say yes...

One of the funniest and most annoying things on the farm was a lady we called the Profe…

The ´profe´ was a strange strange lady, she is Paraguyan... and just such an interesting person to watch... I could actually watch her all day... just so interesting BUT she talked to everyone as if they were small children… She had dyed bright red hair and had matching lipstick on with out fail and always wore BIG bright green or purple eye shadow… her eye liner was always a mile away from her eyes… whenever she talked to you she would purse her lips and batter her eye lids… she would also start EVERY conversation by saying…. ‘hmmmmm Ruth”… (then in Spanish she would say)… ‘you understand Spanish well right? You understand what I am saying to you right now?’ I would think to myself… duh that is why we had a conversation in spanish yesterday… But would just nod and smile…

well one day this is what she then proceeded to ask me…

she asked me to help her make a sign... so we sit down and the she says... ´now I will draw the letter and you will cut them out’ ‘you know how to use scissors right?''´ I am 21 for heavens sake, how could someone make it to 21 and not know how to use a pair of scissors... In my head I had to tell myself to ´love... just be kind dont be sarcastic´ because she had made a number of similar comments earlier and I was pretty much fed up with being treated like a kiddy... so anyway then every time she finshed drawing a letter she would hold it up and say ´look´ and I would have to oooo and aaaaaah over this letter telling here how bonita (beautiful) her block letters were... it was just bizarre and when an older girls came to tell me it was time to go to the park I was super happy to escape haha...

While in Honduras I met this girl from the States who was teaching in a school with a mission set up for kids who worked or whose parents worked on the rubbish dump from Teguc…So on the 23rd of Dec I took the day off and went to visit her…
They were on holiday so I couldnt see the school but I went and hung out at her place and we made christmas biscuits and iced them!! It was very exciting to do something christmasy. I ended up staying the night as it was dark when we finished and needed to catch a early bus (takes like an hr) to be back before 8 when I started work at the home... well good thing I got back early because Christmas in Central America is actually on the 24th so I got back and everyone was getting ready for a big day…

We ended up having a big lunch (traditionally they eat their big Christmas meal at midnight of the 24th) as some of the kids were leaving the project to have Christmas with their families… so we had a big lunch… Chicken, potato salad… and something called tutti fruity which was apple, grapes, corn, marshmallow and sour cream… Interesting… No desert (one thing I really missed apart from family on Christmas)…

Then we had present time… The kids all got a few presents which was super nice… one of the newest boys was so overwhelmed that he had got two pressies that he only opened one and saved the other to be opened later… a few days later it was still wrapped and in a safe place)… It was so cute…

The kids who stayed at the project were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted on Christmas eve and they all lit fire crackers and had some fun… I headed to bed at 2.30 am I just couldn’t hack it any longer but the kids really made the most of the night and stayed up till about 4 or 5am…

On Christmas eve the other two volunteers (from Denmark) and I also had a wee celebration of our own… chocolate, chippies and sparkling grape juice, coke and biscuits… Note a lack of Pav, icecream and fresh berries… these were sorely missed… the 25th was a super quiet day as they do not do anything special… this was really weird for me…

So the next big thing was that the profe left for holidays on the 24th of dec after lunch… but before she did we had a little fun…

Before she left she comes up to me and says...'hmmmmmm ruth' (batting her eyelids like normal and pursing her lips) 'I have something for you... I am really worried about you staying here in this house by yourself so I bought you this lock which one of the boys will install soon on the inside of this door here see' (it was a deadbolt sort of thing with a padlock)...
(ok so I already had a front door with a good sturdy lock and then a closed in porch with another lock on it and there is a guard with a gun walking round all day and night... I think I was safe)...
I just nodded and smiled... Then she said... 'and everytime you leave you need to shut the padlock'... I then smiled and said sweetly ´but profe if it is on the inside of the door to protect me at night I can not shut the padlock when I leave as it is on the inside´... she looked at me quite harshly and said.. 'but I have expensive things in this house and if it is left alone I wouldn’t want my small fridge and stove top to be taken
(yet again guard on duty all the time and two locks... also the house was at the back end of the property that you would need a farm truck to drive up to so it is pretty near impossible to steal anything from the house that you can not carry with ease and even then it would be tricky...)
I replied... 'but profe whenever we go to church only the guard is here and the two locks have served and I cant lock the lock if it is on the inside'...
she looks at me sternly again obviously agitated that I have figured out a slight problem with the lock situation and says,.. 'well it needs to go on the outside then and you need to lock it everytime you leave!!'
I said (a bit cheekily I must say) 'and what about me?? at night??' I prob should have held my tongue and done some more smiling and nodding but I couldn’t the opportunity to be a bit cheeky was too tempting... I continued 'so do you want it on the outside or in?'... 'outside' was her final response…
Turns out she didn’t buy the lock so much out of concern for my safety but for concern for her fridge and stove... well anyway the older boys were not keen to put the lock on (work) and so on the day I left and she was returning it still had not been welded to the door… on the outside or inside!!

New Years was really interesting… they have a tradition in Honduras where they make a scarecrow like man (kinda like we do in NZ for Guy Fawkes) and they stuff him with not only newspaper but fire crackers… so you set off one limb and eventually all the firecrakers get some form of spark and the man convulses as he explodes… I was slightly nervous as in Honduras Firecrakers are not legal anymore… and if you take a child into the hospital with burns from crackers you can be heavily fined or even out in jail… so as we on the project did an ‘año Viejo’ I made sure a;ll the kids knew that if they were burnt they would be making their way to the hospital themselves… No Hondureño jail for me thanks!!

So after New Years I kinda just did the same old thing till the 4th of Jan when I left the project… I spent the night in Teguc… where I went to a mall, got a good coffee… got an AMAZINGLY fantastic caramel pecan cinnamon roll from a place which is pretty much food heaven on earth called Cinabon and found a cosy chair in the mall and read… I bought a novel from a book shop and as I am such a dedicated Spanish student I decided to be hardcore and get a novel in spanish… so I found a Nicolas Sparks novel that had been translated from English to Spanish and I cranked into it… now as it was not a literature masterpiece (ie not full of insane extended metaphors) I managed to understand it really well… in fact I even ‘saw’ the book and had really clear images of what was going on like I do when I read in English… VERY COOL MOMENT!!

I caught the Bus from Teguc at 6 in the morn and arrived just after 6 at night in San Juan del Sur, a beach town in the sth of Nicaragua…

I somehow ended up in the party hostel ekkkk not a great choice for sleep but I did met some funny people... One guy arrived just after me... already drunk drunk... and proceeded to tell me how he had come the whole way from Manuel Antonio in one day (mid-sth pacific coast of Costa Rica)... IN a TAXI!!!! In a TAXI!!!... he paid like 175-200 US dollars (it would have been 10 on a bus max)!! Because and I quote ¨I hate the f***** buses”... Obviously he didnt have a tight (or any kind of budget) right...

I spent the next day on this beautiful beach called Maderas… and then on Thursday crossed the border back into Costa Rica… stood in line for ever at the border as the whole world wanted to return to Costa Rica but made it…

after 4 police stops on the bus I finally made it to the Punt… So good to be home!!!

Please remember that due to the extreme gap of blogging I decided not to post photos… If you want to see photos of arenal, my Nicaragua trip or my Christmas break please find me on Face Book… Choice…

Yay pretty much all caught UP!!!