Twas the night before Christmas

Twas the night before Navidad (Christmas) and all through the casa (house), not a creature was stirring not even a raton (mouse). Ok well that is just patently untrue (except for the mouse part, I have finally won my war against those furry intruders). If this classic story had been written in rural Honduras it would read more like “and bullets and fireworks were whizzing past the house.” That’s because unlike North Americans, Hondurans celebrate Christmas Eve, not by having a relaxing dinner with the family and going to bed early to await the arrival of a present bearing, fat man, but instead eat a whole bunch of tamales followed by gallons of cheap sugar cane alcohol (guaro) and then take to the streets to shoot of fireworks and guns till all hours of the morning. Honestly, if Santa Claus were real (sorry kids, but I honestly didn’t expect you to be reading this), and he delivered presents to Honduras, he would be doing so at his own peril. Rather than coasting in smoothly on his reindeer drawn sleigh to land comfortably on apartment building roofs and sturdy shingle, like in the States, he would have to fly a stealth mission through a hail of gun fire and fire work explosions, like some WWII bomber pilot, and then try to set down on a roof of easily shifting teja (brick tiles, that you have probably seen if you have travelled through the American southwest). He would then have to try to squeeze his sizeable girth through the chimney of a fogon (traditional wood burning stove), and once inside, rather than delicious milk and cookies, he would likely be greeted with left over tortillas.

Well now that I have thoroughly analyzed that hypothetical situation, I would just like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah (hopefully my spelling of that is somewhere in the ball park), and Spectacular Kwanza (not sure what adjective goes there so I just picked a positive one) . This will be my second Holiday Season away from home, and the 23^rd of December will mark my 19^th month away from the USA. This year’s holiday celebrations will be bitter sweet, because they will also represent my last few weeks in Honduras as a volunteer (at least for a while). I don’t want to dwell on this sad news, as I are already working on some touching entries to try to sum up my service in this country. The only thing I know now is that I will be home in DC around the 15^th of January (for anywhere between a month, and permanently) and would love to see all of my friends and relatives back in the USA. This comes as a result of the increasing violence levels in this country, that have recently resulted in a Volunteer being shot in the leg by a stray bullet during an attempted bus assault.

But looking past this unfortunate event and the major changes that are steadily approaching, I would like to briefly look back over my year in Honduras, and point out some of the highlights. I may not have done the best job of using this blog to keep people informed about the work I was doing here; instead I have chosen to concentrate on ridiculous anecdotes and various animal related shenanigans. While I do not regret this choice, I will use this entry to fill you guys in on what I have been doing when I am not dodging bullets at futbol matches and battling vermin in my house. My major projects over the past year have been: acquiring funds to buy desks and chairs (My sincere thanks to everyone who donated) and setting up a computer lab using said desks and chairs, designing an excel spread sheet with formulas that will calculate yearly interest and teaching the local caja rural (micro-finance organization) how to use it (as opposed to their current system of calculating it all by hand using calculators and then recording the information in various badly organized books), helping my counterpart in the Catastro department of the mayor’s office (he is in charge of collecting municipal tax’s and maintaining property documents) to create a digital property map of the casco urbano (the town center), helping my counterpart in the Women’s Office set up a Red de Mujeres (basically a support network of women to promote women’s health issues and create job opportunities for women, and to try to offer help to victims of spousal abuse) at a municipal level, with representatives in the various communities, and continued my work with a group of women who I helped to start a local bakery (we already have plans drawn up to have the municipality build them a café/bakery using funds from the central government that are earmarked for promoting economic opportunities for women). (side note: I know that was the longest sentence ever, but I am feeling far too lazy to go back and figure out how to handle the punctuation).

As a conclusion to this makeshift Christmas letter (at least I didn’t include a picture of a dog, apparently Sarah Palin hates when people do that), I would just like to say that I hope you all have had as rich and fulfilling a year as I have had. It has been trying at times, and I would be lying if I told you that my life here is easy, but I guess that is why they call Peace Corps, “The toughest job you’ll ever love”. (Now I just hope they decide to let me return and continue loving it for the remainder of my contract)

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Some of the Habits I Will Have to Break Before I Go Back to the USA

1) Haggling. When I first got to site I was haggling it all of the time. Haggling in Honduras is just a way of life, especially when it comes to buying ropa americana or other slightly used goods. While it may be a legit practice here, I don't see myself walking into Target and starting a price war when I get back. I often find myself negotiating the fares of my bus rides as well, which is somewhat depressing because I'm literally fighting over amounts generally less than $.25. 

2) Pushing my way onto busses and trains. I admit that when I was living in Cary, IL and having to commute to the Loop everyday that I may have partaken in some territorial grudge matches while waiting for the Metra. Those suburban tiffs, however, pale in comparison to the full on pushing and shoving that I've witnessed here in Honduras between people trying to board the bus. I've straight up been pushed ---and I mean pushed--- by an an eighty year old woman who wanted to board the bus first. Getting a seat on a chicken bus can make or break your day, ask anyone. When I return to the US, civility reigns on public transportation. 

3) Exposing my belly. It's a weird, apparently masculine, thing to do when your really hot down here, and amazingly it works, but it is super campo. Honduran men do it all of the time, and I picked it up while working on the soccer field with various day laborers. On a hot day in La Ceiba, nearly every man who is not wearing a button down shirt will be exposing his belly. I mean if everyone else is doing it why not, right? 

4) Being Catracho: "You're more Catracho then us," said the Honduran professor from Harvard, as he lauded our use of vernacular, hand flips, and lip points. The hardest thing to shake will be all of the little cultural things I've picked up while living here. Saying buen provecho before every meal, often to people I don't even know as they're eating, pointing the direction of things with my lips, flipping my hand to expose my palm when I need something or just want to say "what's going on", showing the back of my hand when signaling for someone to ven aqui, hastily slurring words and phrases like, no hombre (pronounced nombre), randomly dropping the "s" off of words like vos o pues, saying adios to nearly every one I pass on the street, even if I don't know them, and of course perpetually muttering permiso while working my way through a crowded bus or room. 

5) Drinking things with sugar. I've tried to fight it,but I have found myself addicted to those molecular complexes of energy. I never added sugar, or really even drank pop before I came to Hondu. That is going to be a hard addiction to break.  My teeth and body will thank me for giving it up though. 


6) Restoring meeting etiquette. Not answering my cell phone. I use to detest this practice, but I have found myself mimicking Hondurans when it comes to answering your phone during the middle of the meeting and not excusing myself from the table. An excerpt from our friend Jenna on cellphone use in Honduras from her blog JP (that's jota-pe) in Honduras.


I looked up to see the head nurse text messaging. Text messaging. Moments before the baby’s head was about to crown. Infuriated, she yelled, ‘Put down your phone and help me!,’ to which the text messaging fiend of a nurse sassily responded, ‘Nadie aquí le puede ayudar, mamita…¡empuje!’ (No one here can help you sweetie… push!). Right!?!?!? I mean… can you BELIEVE that? The answer of any person who has ever spent any amount of time in Honduras: absofuckinlutely.

Honduran cell phone etiquette is otro pedo (this means ‘something else’, but the literal translation is ‘other fart’... it’s definitely in my top five favorite Spanish phrases). Here, phone calls and text messages are answered under practically any circumstance, childbirth included. In my first few months here I would attend the bimonthly meetings which municipal authority figures are required to hold by a law put in place to encourage transparency and mitigate corruption in local governments. Anyways, in these meetings, an act is read recapping the previous meeting’s content, then those present discuss current projects being carried out in the town, proposed projects (latrine construction, electrification of a neighborhood, a sanitary landfill, etc.), and requests from poorer people in the community for funds to travel by bus to Santa Rosa and pay for a medical consultation at the hospital. In other words, things that could potentially be important. These meetings tend to last somewhere around four hours and for every single one of the 14,400 seconds of those four hours, someone at the table is dicking around on their phone; I’ve even witnessed people who are sitting directly across from one another sending messages to each other.

I wonder if taking pictures of someone on their phone is considered more rude than simply being on your phone?

Some of the Habits I Will Have to Break Before I Go Back to the USA

1. Eating exclusively with my hands

As anyone who has traveled in Central America (or Langley Park, MD) can tell you, Central American food is mostly finger food. Almost all of the typical dishes here can be consumed with nothing more than your hands and a tortilla (this includes most soups, which often feture large chunks of meat still on the bone, or still unpeeled plantains). Thus for the past year and a half, any meal I have consumed outside of my home (or those of other PCVs) has been eaten with my hands and tortillas (you are often given a fork, but it is pretty much relegated to the job of a makeshift cutting implement, so as to break your food up into pieces small enough to manhandle into your mouth with your tortilla). Somehow I don’t see this style of eating goving over well in fine dining establishments in the states (and I’m also guessing it will be hard to get tortillas at said restaurants.)

2. Wearing Chucks to work

When I got my acceptance letter from PC Honduras, it came with a list of clothing items we should bring, and they tended towards the formal side. Being the naïve aspiring volunteer that I was, I took them at their word and packed to the list (I even brought a blazer). Well it turns out that the before mentioned list was a load of BS (pardon my French). The most dressed up I have ever seen anyone at my mayor’s office is a dress shirt tucked into jeans, with cowboy boots (more on that later), and on an average day, most of my male coworkers are in knockoff Hollister (which is like the hottest brand ever down here) T-shirts and polos, with jeans and tennis shoes. Thus after the first few days of being hilariously over dressed, I settled into a rotation of checkered snap-down western shirts, jeans, and beat up old Chuck Taylor All Stars. And quite honestly had I been assigned to somewhere in Choluteca (the southernmost department, and by far the hottest place in the country), I would probably just show up a work in gym shorts, flip flops and mesh basketball jerseys (because honestly you can play most things like that off as just something that we crazy gringos do.) Sadly I have resigned myself to the fact that in no job I want in the states will this type of outfit be acceptable, so I am making sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

3. Having ridiculous facial hair

Now most of you who know me, know I am an aficionado of ridiculous facial hair, and made my share of questionable shaving decisions in the USA. So it will come as no surprise to you that I have been experimenting with beard options down here in Honduras as well. What I have come to realize, however, is that when I return to the states I will probably be in the market for my first real (grown up person) job. And I know I don’t have much experience working in offices, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they are not big proponents of old-timey bartender mustaches that connect to your sideburns or facial hair that makes you look like a Spanish conquistador. So as a result of this revelation I have decided to dedicate myself to growing extra ridiculous facial hair in my remaining time here. This is great because, here people already stare at me so a little added facial hair is hardly of interest. I have also decided that I need to grow a serious mustache at some point before I return, since here mustaches are a sign of manliness and maturity (whereas in the USA they are a sign of being a power tripping State Trooper, a 70’s porn star, a child molester, or a dirty, dirty hipster).

4. Playing with/ picking up strange children

In America (thanks the upstanding organizations, like the Catholic Church and Penn State football program) we have a serious fear of sexual predators. This, coupled with our general fear of strangers, means that it is no longer acceptable to talk to strangers kid or pat them on the head. Here in Central America you can pretty much play with any kid you run into on the street and have pretty free license to kiss and hold other peoples babies (including the babies of vague acquaintances or complete strangers). Hell, sometimes this is forced upon you (though this happens to women more than men). On crowed busses for example, it is common place for a woman who is standing up, due to lack of seats, to pass off a baby to a woman who is seated, even if they don’t know each other (here it is also culturally acceptable to not give up your seat to pregnant women and the elderly, though admittedly it seems like a good 50% of the female occupants of any bus are either pregnant or holding babies). So I better get all of my playing with strange children done here, or when I get back I might have trouble explaining to the police that, despite my mustache, I was just trying to be friendly with those kids.

5. Throwing toilet paper in the trash can.

For any of you who have not traveled outside of Europe and the USA, most countries in the developing world still do not have a good system of indoor plumbing in place (in most developing countries there are actually more people with cell phones than people with access to indoor plumbing). And for those of us in developing countries who are fortunate enough to actually have indoor plumbing; it is not so well pressurized as to allow us to flush toilet paper. Thus we are forced to keep a special waste basket in our bathrooms to collect “soiled” toilet tissue. Those of us in rural towns without real trash pickup, have to take this toilet tissue into our back yards and burn it (as you can imagine, burning “soiled” toilet paper is no picnic). Thus after over a year and a half here in Honduras, I am well conditioned to putting my toilet paper in the waste basket rather than flushing it down, and am pretty sure that when I get back to the states it will take me a little while to break this habit. Soooo, any of you who are going to have me in your homes soon after my return, I would just like to offer a heartfelt apology in advance for putting my soiled toilet paper in your trash can.

The power of words… Or, how many ways do you really need to say “pig”?

This past weekend I was riding in a moto-taxi (basically, a super light weight, Indian made, three wheeled motorcycle that has a bench seat in the back for passengers, and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in smaller Honduran cities due to its gas efficiency) in Ocotepeque and got into a discussion with the driver about what I was doing in Honduras and what it was like adjusting to life in the country. This is a conversation I have at least once a week, and I have established a set of stock answers that I can rattle off almost without thinking about it (ex. Yes, it was hard to adjust to the food, but now I love tortillas, and no, in America we do not just eat all of our food out of cans… no, I am not doing an internship, I already have my university degree and chose of my own free will to come here and work for about 5,000 Lempiras [about 250 USD] a month… and no, this is not a punishment because I committed a crime in the USA, ect.). In this particular conversation, the driver asked me a commonly asked question, “Was it hard to learn Spanish, because we have so many words for the same thing, whereas in English each thing only has one name?” I always find this question annoying because it is based on completely incorrect assumptions, both about the English language, as well as what is difficult about learning Spanish. It is incorrect, first off, in assuming that English has only one way of referring to any given thing (I am always curious as to how the people who tell me this, as if it were a definite fact, are completely sure that English is like this, considering none of them speak a word of it). This can be disproved rapidly; for example we have a come up with a multitude of ways to refer to money over the years (currency, tender, bucks, cash, bills, dollars, green, cabbage, clams, dead presidents, … ect). It is also incorrect in assuming that this is why we would have trouble learning Spanish, and in doing this, overlooks the numerous differences between the two languages, that actually prove to be the serious stumbling blocks for non-native speakers. These include, among other things, the existence of gender in Spanish (all words are masculine of feminine and thus one must use know when to use “el” vs. “la” for “the”, and when to use “un” vs. “una” for “a”), the difference in pronunciation between the letters in the two languages (made harder by the existence of the double “r”, which required one to roll their “r”s in a way that doesn’t exist in English, and can be rather challenging for gringos), and the fact that that “to be” in English is represented by “ser” or “estar” in Spanish depending on context.

This question is also amusing to me because the example that every Honduran gives to support this is the various words they have for “pig” (“cerdo”[the actual word], “chancho”, “marrano”, “curro”, “coche”, “Puerco”, “cochino”… ect). Im not sure when they all got together as a country to decide that this would be the example they used (maybe it is part of their classes on dealing with gringos [that assume exist and are mandatory] in which they also cover yelling “gringo” at us, staring unabashedly at us on buses, cat calling American women, and laughing uncontrollably at how it sounds when we speak English), considering it is actually an example of a word that we have various ways of saying as well (pig, hog, swine,…ect). As I pondered this question, I began to consider what other words they had a plethora of and came up with “child” (“niño”, “guiro”, “cipote”, “ichoco”, “esquincle” [from Mexico], “bicho” [Salvadoran word, mostly used in border areas], “sambo”, “chino”, “mico”, chinguin”, “mico” …). This got me to thinking about which things different societies develop extensive ways of saying. The Eskimos for example (supposedly) have dozens of ways to say snow, whereas we in America have lots of ways to say money, and Central Americans have a ton of ways of referring to children. I feel like maybe societies just come up with lots of ways to describe things that they have a lot of. Eskimos are surrounded by snow 12 months of the year (well until global warming really starts to kick in), America has long been one of the richest countries in the world (and Americans are often times a bit money obsessed), and Honduras has one of the highest birth rates in the hemisphere, and thus there are a lot of children running around (41% of the population is under the age of 14 [according to the information PC Honduras gave us during training]).

Having developed this air tight theory, I began pondering other linguistic oddities. This led me to realize, that often times here in Honduras there also exists the reverse phenomenon, in that many things are referred to by the same word (and this can actually prove to be more of an inconvenience). The most blatant examples being “picar” (which, in Honduran vernacular, refers to: “sting”, “bite” [from an insect/ snake], “itch”, “to be spicy”, “the pang of hunger” and a few more sensations I cannot remember at the moment) and “bomba” (which refers to: “fumigator”, “the mechanism in the back of a toilet”, “a bomb”, “a homemade gun”, “a plunger”, and any sort of “pump”, including an air pump for a bicycle tire, soccer ball, or car tire, and a water pump for irrigation). I feel like this linguistic shortcoming is a result of the lack of education in this country. People who are not provided with a sufficiently ample vocabulary, with which to describe all of the sensations and objects that they encounter, will invariably be forced to make do with the vernacular that they have at their disposal. Well, I guess with that thought I shall wrap up this long and rambling entry.

There’s a Man with a Machete in My Office… or, Sell me a Cigar, Damn it

I’m going to keep this brief (since I’m feeling lazy, and since the whole encounter only lasted about ten minutes in real life), but I feel like I need to tell you guys about this. The other day I was at the mayor’s office as usual and I left the main building entrance to head back to my office (which is basically a converted storage closet, with an entrance around the side of the building). I was a bit distracted and it wasn’t until I was actually half way through the door that I noticed the old, wild eyed, campesino man standing inside my office with a machete in hand. Now, back in the US, I feel like this kind of thing would probably have freaked me out (just a bit). After a year of living in Fraternidad however, it didn’t really phase me all that much, and the first thing I did was to ask him who he was looking for, and how I could help him (as opposed to the normal US reaction of “dear god, don’t kill me”). This was when things got weird (well weirder). He continued what he was doing when I came in, which was peering at the wall behind my door, and without missing a beat, asked me where I kept the “puros”. Now I was expecting a question about some sort of municipal business and this threw me for a loop. My mind began quickly racing through possible other meanings for the word, but I kept coming back to “cigars”, which is the only meaning I knew for that word. As I asked him some clarifying questions it rapidly became clear that he was indeed looking for cigars, and had been doing so since the day before. It turned out that some “muchacho” (word for boy or young man) had directed him to the “big yellow house” (the mayor’s office) and told him to go see the gringo, since he sold cigars. By this point I was pretty confused, but was coming to realize that the old man was definitely a bit off in the head (that or really drunk, though he did not smell of booze). Also at this moment I heard a whistling coming from one of the houses that backs up on the mayor’s office (people here can whistle with amazing force), and looked up to see one of my friends on his back porch laughing his butt off. He yelled to me that he had directed the old man my way since I sell the best cigars, and I realized that I had been had. Assuming that this would be the end of the confusion I explained to the old man that it had been a joke and that I did not actually sell cigars. He however was neither finished with his quest for cigars, nor fully convinced that I did not sell them. He continued to try to wheedle some out of me, saying that he would be content with just one (or even if I could just see fit to give him a wad of tobacco to chew on). Eventually he bagan to get a bit agitated that I was so clearly holding out on him, and I decided that I didn’t like the idea of having a debate with an agitated (and as I realized by this point, clearly delusional) man holding a machete, alone, around the side of the building. Thus I walked back to the main office and proceeded to pass him off on the vice mayor, who is also one of the biggest “chavacanes” (tricksters/jokers) in town who calmly listened to the man’s request and explained that we (the residents of the “big yellow house”) had recently run out of cigars, but that the folks in the health center had tons (and that he [the old man] should not take “No” for an answer from them, since he [the vice mayor] had given them a whole bunch of cigars just the day before). In retrospect it seems kind of mean that people just pass off this man (who it was explained to me is not of a right state of mind) on others, leaving him to wander around the streets all day, but I’ve come to learn that it is pretty much standard practice here (they do the same thing with the mayors mentally handicapped nephew when he gets confused and shows up looking for his pay check multiple times in the same day [he gets paid by the municipality to collecting trash with the garbage truck once a week]).