After spending two months here in Peace Corps in Honduras, I have begun to develop new ways of entertaining myself. While in the states, I was constantly bombarded with cable tv shows, sporting events, video games, and if all else failed endless hours of youtube videos (so at the very least I could spend an afternoon watching people making asses of themselves). Here pretty much all of these options are limited or non-existent. For example, television no longer offers me a lineup of new sitcoms and foul mouthed cartoon shows. These have been replaced by badly dubbed American action movies (don’t know why but they like love “Fast and the Furious 4” here) and spectacularly ridiculous Mexican telenovelas. The latter of which are actually good for some solid minutes of laughs the first few times you watch them, because they are super over the top in their plot lines and about as subtly acted as professional wrestling bouts (with interestingly enough are quite popular here, and I had to explain to one of my host brothers that they are in fact staged). Though when this novelty wears off you are left searching the five channels you have for some semblance of a futbol match (oh how I miss the world cup. When that ended I lost like 2/3rds of my cross cultural conversation starters). On the whole however, I don’t really mind this fact, seeing as I did not come here to watch tv (though it is actually hard to avoid watching some, in a country where almost everyone , regardless of socio-economic status, has a tv on and running in their house pretty much 24/7). But without internet access or American tv, you are forced to send a lot more time out and after living between Boston and DC, there is limited entertainment to fill your day with in rural Honduras. You can only play futbol so much in one day, and the other local entertainment of staring at the gringo is far less entertaining when you are in fact that gringo.
This is where the point system comes into play. One of my fellow aspirantes (aspiring PCVs) and I have developed a game, in which we assign random point values to things that we witness in our daily routines here, that would seem strange or outlandish were we to witness them in the states. The number of points for an occurrence is loosely based on how wild the occurrence would seem in the US, how common it actually is here in Honduras, and how much we laugh upon witnessing it. Thus for example seeing a woman standing on her patio in a downpour feverishly sweeping water off of cement (despite the fact that it is falling far faster than she can move it) gets you one point, because while it is pretty outlandish and silly to American sensibilities, it is super common here. I’m pretty sure that nationally, it is like the second most popular sport after futbol.
To give you a better sense of the game here are a list of some of the events that stuck in my mind, with their corresponding point scores. A child throwing dove babies out of the eves of his parents house into a trash can his mother is holding open below, as she cheerily invites us to come take a look at them (she also mentioned something to the extent of “don’t worry we are taking care of them” as if we would see these baby chicks as a menace) : 15 points. A guy taking a poop in the local stream while reading the paper and smoking a cigarette (behind little to no cover): 30 points. A woman breastfeeding her, what looked to be, 5 year old kid in the middle of a town hall meeting: 30 points. Walking out of your room to find a burlap sack full of live chickens: 10 points. Trying to take a shower and realizing there is a huge tarantula in there with you, then having your host mom throw it on your bare leg with a broom: 35 points. Ect…
