A Little Reality TV

Want to pitch a new reality show to CBS? Try 6 teachers in rural Honduras, all strangers, living and working together in small houses with little means for escape. Every comment made over dinner, or beers, or lunch break, is analyzed for hours on end into late night gossip sessions where one would really prefer to talk about something safe and easy, like the war, Bush, abortion, whatever... anything besides the he said/she said crap.

blah blah blah

If we could really vote someone out I would volunteer just to get away from the TVisms of the whole existance here. Cut the cable. Cut the crap.

I need a car.

Just another day in Honduras

4 things you usually don't want to see in the plane...

1. Russian
2. The yellow mask hanging down after the flight
3. The pilot standing because there is no more room
4. The breeze comming from the open window and the siding next to the seat, not the overhead air nozzel

Roatan

Going to the Bay Islands is a lot more like the Bahamas than the main land of Honduras. There are actually tourists there, and English is the main language, though the accent is definitely Caribbean and the music is reggae. It was the long Independence Day weekend, so after an hour on a 20 passenger prop plane, the other teachers and I find ourselves on a hot and humid island with an amazing coral reef a two minute swim from shore, long sandy beaches, mangrove forests and canopy tours complete with macaws and monkeys. So I snorkeled, kayaked, zip-lined and enjoyed island time away from second graders.

Lightning off shore. It looks like a black and white sunrise picture, but I swear it's not!
The Canopy tour was a perfect combination between working on the boat (all harnesed up and double clipped in) and forestry, (eye level with the monkey in the tree). I think I'm addicted!


Kayaking into a small mangrove forest was a treat. There were over 30 egrets and herons hunting, crabs and jellyfish in the water and a nice shady spot to watch it all.

Independence Day, Honduran Style

Independence Day isn't any good without a parade, right? So the tradition here in Honduras is for the kids to march (we march around the Zamorano campus) with flags and some music. Last year they had a few drummers, which sounds nice. This year they decided on a 20 piece marching band with gymnasts and baton twirlers. Now, we spent a lot of time practicing how to line up and march in well organized rows. And we did, too, for the first three or four steps, then chaos, dancing and fun. Lucky for us it was a half day of school and no one expected us to actually teach anything.

Thirsty?

MMMMMMMM, our drinking water...


The water went off again and turns back on to this. Now the lightening is almost overhead, so I should go.

Sunday Drive

There is a teacher's truck that we can use to go between here and Tegus. It's a great gift and a nice jesture, but also a reminder of how little we are able to see without having to take the Chicken buses. Anyway, on Sunday, I went up one of the side dirt roads adjacent to campus. It was great to drive again, and great to have a few hours to myself. However, given road conditions, two hours resulted in a little over 25 kilometers. Here are a few pictures of what I saw, (taken while driving so nothing spectacular....but)

A chicken bus. They really are the old, retired American school buses, and on a rare occasion, they have the school district's name painted over with a colorful stripe or swab of white. They are just as comfortable as they were in Jr. High, only now they have three adults to a seat, people standing in the aisles and some loud tunes playing on the radio.
The other option for transportation: the back of a pick-up.
Oh, right, one more kind of transportation. Donkeys and horses are around, but less common.
The unfortunate translation on the sign for the orphanage that we play football (soccer) with every month.

A failrly nice house along the road. It's typical to have just bare bricks or unpainted plaster, but sometimes you do get some nice coler. Even pink.

A Typical Tuesday...

Arriving home after work, the TV managed to stay off for almost four hours, a colony of traveller ants took over the front bush, the water went dry, and I painted a mural on my wall (hope the don't care...)

First, the ants. They are the large, bighting black ones and thousands of them were crawling accross our front steps, up the bush and into the tile roof. So many of them were there that as they clambered to get to the top, a number of them were pushed off and rained down back to the bottom of the bush where they dutifully tried again. Hours later they seemed to get to their goal; small, opaque eggs of some unknown variety. Termites? By morning they were gone, off to invade some other nest in some other part of the world.

Tuesday was also the third time we had no water. It's never dire, but it is a mild inconveience and makes you appreciate the world a little more when you do have it. The water on campus is purified, perhaps not to our drinking standards, but fine for washing dishes and brushing teeth. When the water went on it only took an hour for the power to go off. It went off twice during the night, resulting in two trips to reset the house alarm and the morning alarm clocks. It's fine, but it doesn't make for good sleep. The power goes off a lot here, but usually at night.


So for my entertainment, I painted a Matisse on my wall. It doesn't match my new Lenca vase, but it will work.