Daily Life

Sometimes at any random moment of the day, I stop and I wonder what those that I love and miss so much are doing at that exact moment. If I popped into Kalamazoo, where would I find my Mother at 1:17 p.m. on this Friday afternoon? I imagine her cooking lunch, maybe a tomato soup, or cheese sandwiches. I CAN imagine, because I know the place. I can picture the house, the surroundings because it is my place that I claim as a part of me. However, when you think of me, you can't really imaine with accuracy because Honduras is not a place that you can claim as your own in your experiences. So my challenge becomes complicated as I have to paint an entire picture as acurately as I can with detail for you to picture and become a part of my life still as I live far away in this foreign country. Really though, it is not so foreign and so different because we are all human. With the changes of language, climate, foods, culture--people are still people with the same overwhelming emotions of love, sadness, anger, and happiness.
I feel like the paper before me is immense and my job is to paint it vibrantly and accurately for you. What color should I start with? Should I paint the background scenery first? I'll tell you that each day I wake up in a sweat, baked from the heat. The dust enters through the front screened windows and cakes our floors with a dust icing. The landscape is brown, beige, vacant of greenery. The land, the people, the farms, the cows all thirst for water. There are abandoned donkeys that are too old to haul that roam the streets and wake us up in the middle of the night with their loud screeching roars. Our little house is on the main dirt road leading to the center park of Moroceli. Across the street, a nice pulperia (convenience store awaits with sodas, juices, crackers, and other packaged foods). With all the details painted, the overall landscape is a brown dusty town with donkeys, horses, and cows that randomly walk by.
Now for the foreground, I fill in the detail of my weekly routine. Sunday finds us leisurely hiking, or biking to neighboring villages to explore our surroundings. In my United States culture, if I walked up to a stranger's house and introduced myself kindly asking for a cup of coffee, the owners would most likely tell me to leave and call me a tresspasser. A stranger on the doorstep is percieved as danger and a potential robber. Here, where the women often spend all their time in their homes tending to the children, cooking, cleaning, handwashing laundry (beleive me this takes lots of time), they love visitors. On Sundays on our long hiking adventures, we often visit locals, sipping coffee with too much sugar (people here drink sugar with coffee rather than coffee with sugar). I use my freetime to practice guitar, read lots and lots of books, and crochet. On Sunday evening at seven p.m., I started an English class for the older high school students and they come to teach sixth graders on Wednesday. The problem I had this past week was that only one high school student showed up on Wednesday to teach the sixth grade out of the nine students that come to my Sunday class. On Monday, we wake up around 6:30 or so and eat bananas or have oatmeal for breakfast and then we head to the high school which is only a five minute walk from our new house. The high school is overloaded with students and has about fifty students per teacher. I teach an hour class on how to write articles for newspapers and am trying to get a bimonthly newspaper going to sell to the community written by the high school students. I started this project about three weeks ago. The students all voted on a title for the newspaper, discussed article ideas, and are now writing their rough drafts of their articles in groups of three or four students per group. Steve will work with them this Monday and teach them how to put them into microsoft word on the computer and put them into columns. I will keep you up to date on how this project continues. We walk home for lunch (usually beans, cucumber, tortillas, or spaghetti). Every afternoon, we visit people in their houses, go to the computer center, and try to help out at the art/culture center.
Tuesday we ride our bicycles to a village called Suyate and teach English and computer class. Wedesday, I hang out in the high school assisting various classes with discipline and go to the elementary school at ten to "observe" the group of high schoolers that supposedly agreed to teach the sixth graders English. I will let you know how many come next Wednesday. Thursday is the day to ride our bikes to a village called Guadalajara (about an hour ride on bumpy dirt roads including taking off our shoes to cross a river). There we teach English, and give talks about self esteem, drugs, communication. Friday we usually go to Danli to buy groceries and escape Moroceli. On Saturdays we are helping start a local market in Moroceli where people that have farms nearby in the mountains can come down and sell their produce. Now everybody goes to Danli or Tegucigalpa to buy their fruits and vegetables. I am tired to painting now. I hope I gave you enough detail to paint you a decent picture of our daily life here in Moroceli, Honduras.

The current moment finds us in the Peace Corps office in Tegucigalpa. There is a book exchange here and I am borrowing the books INTO THIN AIR by Jon Krakauer, THE NOTEBOOK by Nicholas Sparks, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by L.M. Montgomery, STONES FROM THE RIVER by Ursula Hegi, and PRODIGAL SUMMER by Barbara Kingsolver. Any thoughts and recommendations on what to read first? Email me! I love to hear from you. Love and big abrazos, Teresa and Steve too!