Tortillas, and other musings

Food:
I feel that food is a pretty important part of my daily routine and thus I figured that I should explain the typical diet here in Honduras. While many people in America might assume, using understandable deductive reasoning that, based on the proximity to Mexico, people in Honduras eat what we think of as Mexican food. This assumption is however quite incorrect. The food here in fact only vaguely resembles Mexican food, and even in comparison with American food is not spicy like you might expect.
I’ll start by giving you a basic run down of the staples here. The first of which is most definitely tortillas. These are made of corn meal and while they resemble their flower based, highly processed cousins we buy in the US, taste almost nothing like them. They instead are much heavier and starchier, thus even at my hungriest of times I can only manage about 3 without feeling like I’m going to explode. Shockingly however, the average Honduran (who is about ½ my body mass) will polish off a half dozen with ease. This still baffles me after a month here; because to me consuming that many tortillas is like the Central American equivalent of the saltine challenge. Though, from my conversations with host families and PC staff, I have come to realize that this penchant for demolishing stacks of tortillas makes logical sense. This is because tortillas are made from just corn flour and water, thus making them the cheapest thing around. For this reason, in a country where food and money have traditionally been scarce, people tended to eat a lot of the cheapest/ most filling thing available. Unfortunately for this over fed pampered PC volunteer the insistence on serving guests a mountain of heavy, carbohydrate filled tortillas with every meal has continued in families where food is plentiful. Thus my college beer gut will soon be replaced with a tortilla panza.
Some other basic staples here are beans (a great source of inopportune flatulence to be sure), plantains, rice, queso, and mantequilla. I feel that I should explain the last two, as they can easily be misinterpreted by people who understand Spanish but have not been to Honduras. Queso here is not anything like the nacho cheese often referred to by the same name in popular Mexican themed restaurants in the US. Instead here it refers to a hard crumbly white cheese, which is loaded with salt, and can taste like anything from salty cheese to a salty foot (depending on quality of course). Mantequilla can also be confusing, because in Spain it refers to butter, but here it refers to a substance much like sour cream, but inexplicably slightly different. I would say that across the board these are the two foods (or condiments depending on your definition) that new PC volunteers have the most trouble adjusting to. Though I will acknowledge that both can be very good if used in moderation, especially in Baleadas. These delicious cousins of the quesadilla are a flour tortilla folded over a warm melty layer of queso, refried beans, and mantequilla. In their most basic from they are quite good, but there are oh so many variations. Some of my favorites include carne asada and for breakfast, a combo of scrambled eggs and fresh avocado slices.
I also feel that I should make mention of the spices of choice here in Honduras. For the most part these spices fall under the twin headings of sugar, and salt. They fricken love both of these down here, I mean they cannot get enough. I have personally watched people eat both of these by the finger-full on their own. Salt finds its home in or on almost all foods you can think of here, from basically all cooked dishes to salads (which mostly just consist of cucumbers and iceberg lettuce, and are pretty scarce). Despite this I would venture to assert that sugar is even more prevalent, especially with the popularity of coffee down here. People will sugar any drink that is not soda, as it is conveniently laden with its own cane sugar(that’s right no corn syrup at least, thank god!). But the sugaring of juice and milk (yes milk!) is kids play compared to what they do to their coffee. While I personally don’t drink coffee, or any caffeinated beverages for the matter, this is a major point of conversation among PC volunteers. Apparently the common practice is to add sugar to the coffee grinds or instant crystals while making the coffee, to pre-sweeten it, then sugar is added to the completed coffee, and finally the sugar bowl is always presented with the coffee cup in case the recipient desires a touch less coffee with their sugar.
The other sad irony of this equation is that the coffee its self is generally bad, and invariably comes from the US (my current host parents use Folgier’s grounds from a big plastic container). This is troubling in a country that is one of the largest coffee producers in the Hemisphere. This sad fact is result of the fact that Honduras, as the result of chronic government mismanagement and corruption, coupled with abuse by predatory US companies, has never developed the mechanisms for sorting and processing coffee. Thus they ship the beans to the US, where this value adding is done, and afterwards the lowest quality, and cheapest beans are turned around and sold back to Honduras at marked up prices. Thus as you sit here not an hours drive from coffee plantations, you are more than likely drinking the same cheap coffee being served in office lobbies in the US.
I would like to conclude this installment on a high note however. Thus I will briefly mention mangos and avocados. Both of these fruits are super abundant and super delicious here. The avocados are always the highlight of any meal here, often served as an accompaniment to many typical plates here. And the mangos are just awesome: ripe, juicy, and easy to be had off of trees in my parts. So ill leave you with the mental image of me polishing off a tree’s worth of mangos.

Training:

I don’t want to bore everyone with a day by day account of my training experience, so I will try to generally explain my average day using a metaphor that I have come to see as more and more accurate each day. Peace Corps training is much like middle school. The similarities begin with the early morning wake up. As I recall I had to get up at 6:30 am every morning to go to middle school, which is comparable to the 5:30 am routine here. Though here my pre-dawn rising is accompanied by a ice cold bucket bath, which each time leaves me envious of my middle school self who had access to piping hot showers every morning (though on the plus side,I dont have to deal with being a fat middle school kid with braces now, so things could be worse). The comparison continues as i run to catch the bus to school with my friends. In fact, the bus here may very well be the same bus from my childhood, as all of the public transit busses here are derelict American schoolbusses that were deamed unfit for future use in the US. Though now they sport cool decals from brands like ¨No Fear¨ and ¨Orange County Choppers¨, and have bootlegged sterio systems.
Once I get to school... (crap i actually typed this when i meant to say training), I have Spanish classes in the morning until lunch at 11. Then at lunch we all check out the food our host moms packed us and trade for amongst ourselves to try to get the best lunches. Currently the highest value items are meat or fruits, with the lowest value items being tortillas (which are a constant part of the diet here, i would guess i average like 10 a day). We then have lectures on everthing from the dangers of assault, robbery and rape, to disentary and how hondurans do not understand or enjoy american sarcasm or sense of humor. Then we all pile on the bus for rides home.
Much like middleschool, the best part of the day is when i get home and play football with my friends, though here it is futbol rather than american football. Hillariously though my friends are still 12 year olds, because i seem to be a major hit with the adolecent boy demografic. We play futbol and they laugh at farts and burps so i feel like i can relate. Then when it gets dark our moms call us in and we all scamper home to be chided for getting muddy and eat dinner. I then hang out with the family and watch some tv (if my hw is done of course). My day ends at about 9 when i got to bed in order to get up for the next day of exciting traning.
The entire middle school experience is only hightened by the fact that we all live at home with parents once again and are not aloud to be out after 9, drink in the house, or have visitors of the oposite sex in our rooms. This last caviate, combined with the fact that we are a young PC class (average age about 24) has led to a high level of sexual tension/frustration... much like middle school.

ps. I appologize for the mirriade of spelling and grammer errors, but this computer does not have english spell check and i am in a hurry since the internet cafe is crowded.

Travel

So I began my journey to Honduras (my new home for the next 27 months) on June 22, 2010. I set forth on my new adventure with a solid 3 hrs of sleep under my belt and a hearty breakfast of cereal in my stomach. After arriving at National Airport at 4:30 am for my 6 am flight and going through all the necessary baggage checking measures, I bid farewell to my parents and passed through security (which was shockingly busy for 5 am on a Tuesday. I got to my gate with plenty of time and settled in to wait for the flight to begin boarding. Unfortunately right as they began the boarding process my name was said over the intercom, followed by a garbled message telling me to go somewhere and do something unintelligible. When I asked the agent at the gate he helpfully told me that he was not the one who had made the announcement, and thus it must have been one of three other places none of which he had a means of contacting… oh and that I had like ten minutes to figure out what it was a about and get on the plane. Luckily I then realized that my drivers licence was no longer in my pocket with my boarding pass and began running back to security. There I was informed that they had not been the ones who had made the announcement either but through persistently bothering them I was able to be directed to a cop who had a little stand near by preventing people from coming in the exit door, who they apparently have no coordination with. Thankfully he was in fact the person who had made the announcement and I was able to get my id and run to the plane right before they shut the gate. From there on out it was smooth sailing to Houston, and I even met some other PC volunteers in my layover in Chicago so was able to chat with them and share a cab from the airport to the hotel in Houston, where the PC was holding its staging event.

After an afternoon of protocol explanations and ice breakers I was treated to another 3 am wake up and a bus ride to the Houston airport. As a side note, if you have not been to Houston it is a city with no zoning laws, and thus a hot and humid expanse of urban sprawl (with an airport named after George Bush to boot). At 9 am Houston time we took off, leaving American soil behind for over 2 years. After a smooth flight, we got to experience a landing experience unique to Tegucigalpa airport. For those of you unfamiliar with this airport, it has one runway, which is just long enough to accommodate a modern jet, and is located in a city surrounded by mountains. Thus the landing involves an interesting decent pattern followed by a very abrupt landing. Luckily we had a very good pilot and we didn’t end up hitting any of the houses that line either side of the run way (like 20 feet off each wing). After landing we went through customs and were met at the gate by the PC Honduras staff and taken to our training facility in Zarabanda, in the mountains outside the capital.