We´re not in Kansas anymore.

This week I´ve been blessed with busyness. On Monday I was informed that I would be needed as a translator for a group of Americans. They brought 5,000 pairs of glasses to give away to people in this area. They say that almost everyone here has something called Ptridyum growing across their eyes because of high quantities of sun, dust, and smoke that they come into contact with. We´ve given away several hundred pairs of glasses in this area and I´m proud to say that I´ve diagnosed and given a few more away out the back door. Translator in this case means that I´m also a cultural liason, which has been tiring as well.

The rest of what made this week tiring was that from Tuesday night to Thursday morning, I was travelling with a bunch of campesinos. We were going on a tour almost to Tegucigalpa (long trip!) to see a cane sugar production plant. It was amazing to see their quick, superefficient processing techniques and to discuss them with the campesinos. The men I travelled with have their own sugarcane processing that they do, but it is not nearly as advanced and they don´t come out with brown sugar at the end. Even though 100 lbs of the stuff was only selling for about $26 with half going to expenses, ten men producing ten 100 lb bags of sugar a day is very lucrative.

Travelling with the campesinos, I got to share in their excitement at seeing another part of their country. I was surprised when a few of them told me that they had already travelled as far as Comayagua. Travel is not common here. We had stayed in Gracias the night before at a hotel, a foreign concept as well. Most had stayed up well beyond their normal bedtime (until 10 PM!) to kick off their boots and watch some TV. I shared a room with two campesinos from nearby San Manuel who were fascinated by watching Man vrs. Wild on the Discovery Channel. Actually, they probably related more with that man than with anyone else on TV since they both know their way around the wilderness. The anticipation was thick in the air just after 3:30 AM when we started getting ready to go.

During the travel, they pointed out plants that they recognized and asked each other about the things they didn´t recognize. On the way back, we stopped at Lago Yojoa to eat lunch. When we got off of the bus, I heard one man declare that this must be the ocean. I let them know that it was actually a big lake and they all went out and gazed at it while I answered a few more questions. Then we each got a very special big fish for lunch.

Though we spent many hours travelling that day and we didn´t actually go that far, we passed through many worlds. People rarely travel and because of that, you see plenty of regional variation. The people from one town do things that others don´t. They have thin tortillas instead of thick ones. They have paved roads with lines. They live on flat ground. They have a view of a huge valley. All of these things brought waves of excitement to the bus that are no doubt being relived and splashing new waves in the houses and villages of my travelling campesino friends.

¡La Feria del Fuego!

This last week my parents have been visiting me. Their visit coincided with the annually occuring biggest event in La Campa, the Feria. People had told me for months that the Feria is crazy, that thousands of people (tens of thousands by recent estimate), people from San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, descend on the 500 person town of La Campa. Food, candy, and clothing vendors had been throwing tarp over wooden frames and displaying their goods on tables for weeks in anticipation, catching diminishing hours of sleep as the people flooded in. Because of the impossible logistics of providing shelter and sanitation services for 40 times a town`s normal population, Feria pilgrims slept under their own small sheets of plastic, under their trucks, on the street, or they didn`t sleep at all. A large hole had been dug across the river for defecation, but since it was a few minutes walk from the party and one would likely have at least a couple of simultaneously squatting neighbors, many instead opted for unoccupied patches of grass or dirt around town.

Its been like this for a long time. Saint Matthew, the patron saint of the local colonial church, has been performing miracles for a long time too, the lore of which (and the photo-wall in the church!) attract people far and wide by the horse, truck, bus, and big truck-load. I participated in the march of Saint Matthew around town, where all of La Campa`s old women get together and carry half-meter wooden Saint Matthew on a litter all around the town, singing repetative, enchanting songs about him. The procession follows a ways back, regularly complemented by a home-made rocket flying crazily from a mortar then two pockets of gunpowder ricocheting sucessive blasts off the canyon wall. The walk is only 600 meters long, but walking reverently up and down the mountain at the pace of old women weighed down with San Matias keeps us going for about an hour.

Later on, once my parents had arrived, there were guancascos, when catholic and indigenous customs meet. I found myself being passed by one of these processions one day, headed up by an intimidating-looking masked dancer holding a stick with a wooden lizard hanging from it. At night, these masked dancers and their lizards met the toro del fuego (bull of fire) in the area in front of the church. A volley of the same unpredictable home-made rockets and several more elaborate fireworks announced the meeting as they were launched from the hands of a group of young men on the church roof. The toro del fuego was a guy with a long tent-shaped thing on his head who jumped around the meeting place with the masked lizard-dancers while more fireworks were sent off. A few minutes later the fireworks from the church roof had stopped, but the toro del fuego was dropping military-sized firecrackers behind him and daring them to blast him as he performed his frenzied dance around their burning wicks. Soon a sparkler lit up on the side of the toro and, to my parents` and my shock, proceeded to launch several rounds of rockets from the top of the toro into the starry night sky. The combination of extremes made it the most exciting fireworks show I have ever seen.

The next day, a Honduran cowoker let me know that during celebrations in her village, the children love making their own toro del fuego. Apparently its great, but I was told that they have to be careful, because it can be dangerous! Who knew?

the Culture of Ya

Ya is a fascinating word for any North American. It has to do with time. Used in a sentence, it can mean already or that something will soon happen. Or, when used with no as in ´ya no,´ can mean that it is no longer happening or that it will soon cease to happen. Used as a sentence in itself, it can mean that you´re done, you don´t want any more food, you want more food, or you´re ready to go.

I struggle with the usage of ya. Its such a wonderful word, but it can be so frustrating! For example, one day everyone from my office was driving out to a community. The community was probably about an hour and a half away and we had just left at about 8:30. My coworker got a call from the people in the community, asking if we were going to get there soon because people were getting impatient. Her response: No, no, ya llegamos. Which means, no, no, don´t leave, we´re already arriving. I thought that was ridiculous and I said so, saying that we should have planned to leave earlier if we scheduled the meeting for 8:00. Being at least half North American, I get very uncomfortable when I make people wait because I know that time is valuable and waiting is no fun. My coworker assured me that the villagers wouldn´t be annoyed.

Sure enough, we arrived an hour and a half later and within 5 minutes, you wouldn´t have known we had arrived 2 hours late. It blew my mind to pieces. How is that possible? How can you so easily forgive and forget that someone made you wait for 2 hours?

Sometime later, all of us had just finished eating lunch in a neighboring town. We had at least an hour drive to get back to La Campa. As we were paying the bill and the owner was looking for change, the same coworker decided to go use the internet. The owner came back with the change and we sat down to watch some soccer highlights. After a few minutes, the news came on, which we watched for a half hour. We then watched part of a telenovela, or soap (which are on constantly). Tired of the TV, we went outside and sat in the truck, listening to a very weak radio signal from El Salvador. After an hour of waiting outside, I decided I would make good use of my time and go take some pictures of the town´s church. That sucessfully used up about 10 minutes, and I returned to the truck to find that my coworker had not yet returned. Upon commenting to another coworker, all he could do was shake his head in disbelief. Nearing on the 2 hour wait mark, my coworker returned. ¡Ya! said my coworker whom I had been waiting with. And we made our way back to La Campa, acting as if we had only just begun to wait.

When I asked my internet-surfing coworker about why it took so long, she said that the guy at the internet cafe didn´t know what he was doing. Possible. But no one else even bothered to ask why we had waited for so long. They had tired of the wait as well, but why make a big deal out of it? We had begun our journey back to La Campa.

In North America, we would interpret that as a sign of disrespect and we would be angry about the lost time, the inconvenience. Here, we understand that she was not trying to offend us and waste our time, she was just trying to get something done and it happened to take a while. Since we value our relationship with her in the office and it would not do us any good, it would be foolish to get angry about the wait. Its better if we just get back to La Campa, where we all want to be and since that is now an option, lets get to it. Already. Ya. Brilliant.

Christmas all over again!

Recently I´ve been prepping for something to get started as far as my own work here. I met with my group of youth (anywhere from 12 to 30 and unmarried) the other day and suggested that they plant a vegetable garden to earn money for their group. I thought it would also be a great platform to talk about soil conservation, nutrition, creation, small business operation, planning, and whatever else I can think of. I´m meeting at the high school sometime soon and I´m hoping I can do the same kind of thing with them.

So today I went into Gracias to buy seeds for the garden and I stopped by the post office (where I only get to visit about once a month or so) and I had two Christmas cards! One from my grandma, and one with a million little notes from a lot of people at Prairie Street, my church congregation in Elkhart. Thank you all so much for the kind and encouraging words! In Honduras we call those kind of notes or speeches ´palabritas´ meaning words and with the ´ita´ suffix meaning small/short, cute, nice, or any other endearing word you can think of.

I went to my favorite liquado (fruit milkshake) shop and sipped something delicious as I read through the pile of palabritas. Thank you all so much for sending them, they were wonderful to recieve :)

Lo, the Beloved Campo

I have now been back in La Campa for a week. I came back this time with resolve to get started on something, whatever that may be. In my place of work thats not so easy because its a very small office where everyone travels from nearly every day to visit far-flung communities and participate in projects. Often I end up tagging along, laughing at the humor that I miraculously and joyously now understand, eating the chicken soup delicacy at lunch, and maybe leading the campesinos (as) in a nice little game or two. Other times I stay in the office so that I can feel like I´ve gotten something productive done. Sometimes that works out for me, and sometimes it doesn´t. As you may be able to tell, I´ve been struggling recently with feeling in the least bit useful here. A couple of days ago I felt like doing even a fraction of what I had originally envisioned was going to be nearly impossible.

So I started praying for signs that my presence was meaningful. Probably something I should have been doing all along, but this is how it works. I soon felt very encouraged when I washed my plate after lunch and a few others that were in the sink. This is not at all something that Honduran men do, in my house, this work is reserved for the ridiculously overworked house-servant who´s job title is ´muchacha´. My host brother deposited his plate, and once I started to wash it, he signalled that he wanted access to the sink so that he could wash his own plate. The growing trend is that I have found myself able to recognize small things in the lives of my family and co-workers that I can see that I have had some possitive effect on. Very encouraging and it feels wonderful.

So, I love being back in La Campa. And I´m looking forward to making whatever kind of impact I possible can here. And I´m going to chop this post short so that you can take some time to read Rachel´s and Liz´s posts because I relate to what they said in a lot of ways and they are excellent posts. In case you don´t have time, because I know how packed we like to make our schedules, here is an exerpt from rachel´s post:

´The outside living-ness of Nueva Suyapa such as children playing soccer in my path, donkeys going on their own and mothers bathing their children no longer makes me giddy like it did before. They now are everyday backdrops of the painting I’d like to call my life in Tegucigalpa.´

That painting is a beautiful one indeed.

Back to My Roots!

Liz and I have finished one week of language school here in La Ceiba, on the north coast. This city is named after a huge tree that grows here in Honduras and the city is known as Honduras´ girlfriend. Thats apparently because there is a thriving nightlife here that is lacking in all other cities. Theres a well known Honduran song about La Ceiba that has a really catchy chorus, ´Es mi novia Ceiba, dum da da da dum´ and its kinda fun to sing.

Here on the north coast, the (Honduran-African) Garífuna people live in their own towns. Liz and I went to one this past weekend to hang out. I was really excited because I had heard that the towns are very similar to African ones. It was really nice to walk around that town, smiling at people and being greeted in turn by huge white African smiles. The Garífuna like to play music and dance, but the day we went we didn´t see any maybe because it was raining.

We went for a walk on the beach and finally picked a spot to sit down and enjoy the beach and ocean. The beach was deserted and the waves looked perfect for body-surfing, so I went out to catch a few. Liz went on a walk. While neither of us was watching, someone grabbed our bags (and my clothes) and ran, leaving us moneyless and me mostly naked. By the grace of God, my wallet happened to make its way out of a pocket inside my bag, so we had enough money to easily make it back to La Ceiba. I felt like going back right away would just feel too much like defeat, so I got back in the water, got knocked around by a few more waves, then came back in. We then decided to stop at a hotel and get a coffee to enjoy for a while. We sat at the restaurant and watched a storm come in from the ocean before we made our way out. The owner ended up giving us the coffee for free and we went on our way running through the rain to the bus stop, yelling ´Adios!´to massive white smiles as we ran out of their friendly town. We made it back happily and safely without too many losses, and it was a great story to tell our host-mother. Haha, she really enjoyed telling it back to us the next day, laughing uncontrollably about how we showed up at the door without a key and how I was almost desnudo.

We sometimes talk about how our stuff, our technology, really complicates our lives. We talk about how life would be more relaxed and probably better if we didn´t use technology as extensively as we do. But at the same time we are reluctant to give up our technology because it is the most expensive thing we own. I lost my camera to the beach-robber, but that only means that I am forced to pay more attention to the beauty that I see in everyday life and in the faces of the people I would normally try to take pictures of. I see the beauty or the joy or the life and I say to myself, wow, I wish I could capture that in zeros and ones. But since I can´t, I just take a good look at it and soak it in, remembering not just the image, but also the feel of the rotting dock below my feet, the wet and salty sheen on my face, the rolling waves and the mist that trails them as they pass me on the way to the beach. So regrettably, I won´t be able to post pictures for a while. But I´ll do my best to soak in all this beauty around me and tell you about it as best I can. :)

Sending warmth

This isn't to try to make you jealous, although I'm well aware that it probably will. May you be surrounded by warmth of peace, love, and community. That said, please enjoy some photos of God's creation from the beautiful Caribbean island of Utila :)