adios Honduras.

The final week of school has come and gone. It is certainly going to be bitter sweet leaving this town. I'm going to miss my students a lot. They keep asking me why I'm not coming back and it breaks my heart. I'm also going to miss the neighborhood kids. It's going to be weird not having tiny voices calling "hola!" and tapping on our gate nightly.  Their sweet faces and personalities will never be forgotten. We often wonder what will become of the kids someday. We certainly hope and pray that they will make it out of their situation. Hopefully with Karla learning English and Minerva that will help her for their future.  When Annie and Lauren left the other night, the kids came over to say goodbye. Sergio and Karla (the older 2) started crying. I don't think the younger ones understand that we are leaving for good. It was heartbreaking. Colleen and I  will be saying goodbye to them tonight… not looking forward to it. If I could put Ada(the 5 yr old) in my pocket and take her home, I totally would. 

But it certainly has been a great semester and I'll cherish and take back so many memories from Honduras. It's been amazing to see how people live here with so little, but yet work so hard for what they do have. It's so interesting to hear people here talk about how they perceive the United States. It's almost like a fantasy to them, especially our students. They see fancy celebrities on tv or even Hannah Montana and think we live in a dream world. But in reality, we really do live in a dream world compared to Honduras. No we might not all live in mansions or drive fancy cars like they see on tv shows, but we do have luxuries that they will never have. Every day when I see a lizard on the walls inside our house or laying in my bed sweating with no fan because the electricity is off.. I just think about how this would never happen to me in the states. The one time a blue tailed lizard came in our house back home because we left the deck door open, my mom and I panicked! We literally went into crazy mode. I hopped in my car to drive to Walmart to get those sticky traps while my mom sat and guarded the corner where the lizard was hiding until I got back. We didn't know what else to do because we were definitely not going to get near the lizard. Here, I go to sleep with not one worry in the world about the dang lizard on the ceiling above my bed! Going without water for 2 days straight has just become a part of life. Living out of a backpack's worth of clothes is SO possible because its what I'm doing right now. Before, I never imagined not having my closet full of cute clothes and different outfit to wear every week. Living without my cell phone for 6th months and no debit card have been surprisingly easy. Its funny how in the states I never use cash… even if I buy a pack of gum from a gas station that costs a dollar, I would still use my debit card. Here, we only have the option of paying in cash. And not only in cash, but you have to exact change for most places. Its crazy how these people run businesses and can't make change. It drove me crazy in the beginning but of course I got used to it. 

Im excited to go back home and so beyond thankful for everything I have. God has certainly opened my eyes to a whole new world and this wont be the last time I live and experience a poverty stricken place.

Now, onward to Guatemala and Belize before heading home with my gimp leg! Adios! 

pantyless.

The other day, Ryan, a teacher, was in Sandra's, the principal, office working on something. While he was in there, he overheard Sandra talking to a lady about how her kids should start attending Minerva (our school). The woman responded immediately with "No way, my children will not go to this school!" Sandra was shocked and said "Why not?" The lady proceeded to explain to Sandra that her children would not go there because the North American teachers do not wear underwear. Ryan was so confused. The lady continued to say "I have seen those girls walk by and they don't have on underwear!"

As Ryan tells us this story, we were literally crying because we were laughing so hard. So apparently, she thinks we don't wear underwear because she can't see our panty lines! We wear the Old Navy cotton jersey skirts to school most days and you can see the outline of our butts in them and since she can't see panty lines, we apparently don't have on underwear. Which is quite hysterical. It made us wonder who else in this town thinks we don't wear underwear. Probably everyone. So funny. We started to think of the most fashionable, young Hondurans we know and we realized that we can always see their panty lines. We figured that they only sell full booty panties here. So the silly gringas strike again, pantyless. 

On another note, I got a new boot to wear on my leg. After cutting off the janky Honduran cast, my foot is totally swollen and bruised, as expected. Its like the tennis ball on my ankle has now dispersed throughout the rest of my foot. Even my toes are bruised. I now have a cankle and a fat purple foot. On the right side, it bruised in a way that looks like I might have been attacked by a tiger. It's my new story and I'm sticking with it. Hopefully it heals up enough so I can hobble around in my boot in 12 days when I go travel to Guatemala. Here are some pics of the foot after I cut off the cast:

just call me gimpy

When I was little, my best friend/neighbor Rochelle and I wanted to break our arms so we could have pink and green casts put on so our friends could sign them. I guess in our 3rd grade minds we thought it was the cool thing to have. We tried pushing each other down, falling off fences, etc.. but our natural reflexes to brace our selves always got in the way.  As of age 25, my dreams are finally coming true of having my first ever cast put on. Not as cool as I had imaged it would be back then.. especially since it's not pink and green.

So it all started this morning when my friend Colleen and I went on our usual early morning run through the magical streets of Gracias. We were about 5 minutes away from being back home when my ankle just happened to roll sideways. It rolled and I tried to catch myself but it wouldn't roll back up the right position so I took quite the graceful fall to the ground. I would like to blame it on the crappy conditions of the roads here but to be completely honest it was on straight up flat concrete….. probably the only flat part of the whole city. Go figure. Colleen thought I had just fallen (which is a normal occurrence for me lately) So she sorta started to help me up and I couldn't get up. I thought I had just twisted it. So I laid on the concrete while she hailed a motor taxi. I decided to take my shoe off to look at it and thats when I saw how awesomely, awful it looked. It looked like my ankle had eaten a tennis ball. Thats when I panicked. I just lost it. Started crying/couldn't breathe. Very dramatic, I know. This sweet little lady came out of her shop..I mean I was kinda sorta laying in her doorway… She asked if I was okay and made sure the motor taxi stopped when one was approaching. So I get in this motor taxi that is the size of my pinky toe and I prop my leg up on the bar so its practically in the drivers face. Colleen is laughing/panic laughing because she didn't know what to do. I'm doing the same. The driver starts laughing at me. I'm saying "OH MY GOSH, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO" over and over while laughing/crying as my foot gets bigger and bigger. I think I was just freaking out since I've never had any serious injuries before and I'm in a stinking third world country so I knew if something was seriously wrong I would have to fly home. Colleen being my hero, carried my inside. All the roomies come out and get me ice and wrap it up in an ace bandage. We decided to go get Julie, the teacher who has been here for 3 years and is good at this kinda stuff. So Julie calls our normal doctor (the one I had to poop in a cup for, yeah, my students dad) but he is out of town. But he tells us to go up to the clinic and there is a doctor there. So we go on up to the clinic. The lady doctor there tells me I'm going to need to go to the hospital to get an X-ray. They give me crutches.  I pay 10 dollars to the clinic and we head down to the sketchy public hospital. 

First, I want to say I will never complain about waiting in a doctors office or hospital ever again. I will forever be thankful for hospitals back home. We walk into the emergency room, first thing we see is blood all over the floor. Dried blood spots and some wet blood spots. We all just look at each other and all we can do is laugh. This place looked like it could be in a horror movie of some abandoned hospital. Except its not abandoned.. its definitely real life. There were huge holes in the ceiling. A muchacha was pouring bleach on the walls and scrubbing them down with a broom. Everyone is staring at us. No one will tell us where we need to go. There are no signs. Julie is fluent in spanish and is asking people where we need to be for an X-ray. The emergency room literally consists of a stained curtain hanging with 10 beds behind it where the patients are. These beds are about an arms reach away from one another.

We finally figure out where to go sign in and we head back to the room with the beds to wait. The nurse calls my name and points for me to sit down on one of the beds. I look at this bed and the sheet on the bed is covered with spots of blood. Terrifying. I said "no gracias" and stood up while they took my blood pressure and temperature. About an hour later of waiting in a room full of sick children, they took an X-ray of my ankle. The doctor was so sweet and spoke english. He seemed pretty legit. He said it was a type 2 sprain, whatever that means. He said he needed to put it in a cast in order for it to heal properly. The nurse was standing next to him with the plaster wrap stuff and I started laughing hysterically thinking there was no way I was going to be hobbling around with a huge plaster cast on. I asked if they had the removable boots and he said, "Honestly we just don't have those resources here. The boot would be ideal but you'd have to go to Santa Rosa to get it". I asked what he would do and he said "This plaster cast really isn't very efficient and I would buy a boot". But Santa Rosas hospital is closed on the weekends. He said he wanted to go ahead and put the cast on my leg and I could cut it off when I get a boot next week. After the snobby gringa turned her nose up at the bloody bed, they had scrubbed the bed down and put on a new sheet while we were in the "waiting room" area. So at this point of the cast conversation, I am told to lay flat down on the bed and bend my leg while they put this cast on. The bed smelled like the Sugar Creek Animal Hospital where my dog Stucky T goes back home. Not a good smell.  It was quite the site. Unfortunately none of us brought a camera to document this fine trip to the hospital.  The cast is not quite like what I had envisioned in the 3rd grade. It literally a small piece of plaster on the back of my leg wrapped with gauss. It's SO janky looking, all you can really do is laugh when you look at it. 

Quite the experience I must say. Hopefully it will be a lot better in 2 weeks because I'll be traveling with friends after school gets out. The doctor said I have to wear the boot for a month, but I'm hoping I can gimp around with the boot. I am moving to the downstairs of the house tomorrow. The stairs are not my friend right now. So we are kicking the boys out of their rooms downstairs and switching spots.  Keepings my fingers crossed we don't get any weird diseases after spending several hours in the hospital today.

the norm.

Our house has been invaded by toads. As soon as you walk in the gate, you have to be on toad alert or you might just step on one. They are EVERYWHERE! And I'm not just talking small toads… I'm talking big daddy toads that are the size of my foot! Not even playin. When we got back from Easter break is when we first noticed the problem arising. Some how with the house locked up, 3 toads were inside the house. I mean there are nice gaps between the floor and door but not that big for these big ol toads to get in. It's quite the mystery. But since then, we have about 10 toads hoping around outside downstairs, some big and some small. In the past week, the toads have become smarter and made their way up the stairs to the 2nd level. We've pushed some over the edge of the retaining wall into our neighbor's yard, but that doesn't seem to diminish the toad count. It seems they are multiplying daily. They love to sit right by the doors too. It's very strange. It almost seems as though the frog plague from Exodus has hit Honduras. As soon as they are found in my bed or oven.. I'm outta here. Last I checked, we didn't have any Israelites in slavery around these parts.. but ya never know with these Hondurans!

It's funny how stepping around toads every night has just become second nature. It's totally normal for us to do such un-normal things around here. Just the other night we went out for dinner because we were tired of having our same old meal of stir-fry veggies or curry veggies (sometimes we throw chicken in the pot if we are feeling a little crazy) for dinner. So we went to a local restaurant in town to treat ourselves. While eating our meal, my friend Colleen was telling a story and in the middle of the story Annie leaned over and flicked a huge bug off Colleen's head. Colleen just carried on with her story without a pause, like nothing had happened. It made me realize how hilarious our lives are here without us even realizing it anymore. We have gotten so used to roughin it around here, that bugs, frogs, lizards, dogs, chickens and other creatures in restaurants are just the norm. It's normal for us to be sweaty and dirty at all hours of the day and not even care anymore…especially since they turn our water off several hours a day and sometimes for full days, mostly at night.. we've just adapted.  We've got used to the stares of our neighbors or whoever is walking by our house while we are working out. They love standing on the street, watching us gringas work out on our balcony… it's basically free entertainment and we are used to it. We are used to the fireworks that sound like cannons going off in the middle of the night over and over at least once a week now. We are used to saying "fireworks or gunshots.. yeah definitely fireworks" every time we here a loud popping noise to make ourselves feel better. (mom, its definitely fireworks). We are used to men being total creepers around here every time we talk by them. We are used to siting next to smelly cowboys on chicken buses when we travel and having their sweaty bodies touching ours. 

It's normal and I love it. 3 weeks left of Honduras, woah.


Hers is a picture of one of our toad friends (sorry for the low resolution... it was taken with an iphone)

I know, I'm a slacker

Sorry team. I know I've been slacking on writing on this thing. I've been busy since the colored chicks visited our house… update on the chicks: Estefany (the 2 year old) KILLED all the baby chicks over a week by strangling them.. yes you read that correctly, STRANGLING them. Note to self, don't let your 2 year old play with tiny, live animals.

At the end of April, two other teachers and myself visited a lake in Honduras called Lake Yojoa thats about 5 hours from here. It was in a very small town and about 2 hours of the drive there was on a bumpy, dirt road. Not so pleasant sitting next to stinky farmers while sweating from head to toe on a chicken bus. BUT it was so worth the drive because it was the best place I've been to in Honduras so far. Honduras as a whole is not a very pleasant country, but it definitely has its perks and the lake was one of the top perks by far. It was such a beautiful, quiet town. We stayed in a hostel called the D&D owned by a 25 year old American dude that the girls had met the last time they went to the lake. They had the BEST hamburgers ever. And Bobby (dude who owned the hostel) said the beef was illegally imported into Honduras.. thats how good the hamburger was! The water in the hostel was all purified.. so I could shower with my mouth open, brush my teeth with sink water and fill my water bottle with tap water. It was GLORIOUS! About 15 minutes from our hotel on the outside of this town, there was this place kind of like a swimming park. The water was from the river and Honduran families were there swimming. It looked like this:

All this water dropped off into a waterfall down the hill from there. Let me tell you about this waterfall… it was SO beautiful and HUGE! The girls had already gone under the waterfall the last time they were at the lake and had told me all about how cool/terrifying it was. They explained it as "Lori you HAVE to go under it.. its the best thing ever but its really scary and you could probably die… but you HAVE to do it".. so of course I was intrigued. Annie wanted to go again this time, so we had to pay to get a tour guide to go underneath it (thats how serious it is.. you can't go under it without a guide) So Carlos was our little guide. Annie and I both were about a head taller than Carlos.. I was of course questioning his ability to save me if I was to go under but he said he had worked there for 12 years so I felt pretty confident with Carlos's abilities. So we go down a path to the bottom of the waterfall and Annie asked Carlos if he would take our picture before we got started with her waterproof camera and so he just took it upon himself to be our little photographer the whole dang time.. every step we took Carlos would say "wait. picture!" Hahahah So we have a well documented waterfall experience to say the least bit. It was very scary walking underneath certain parts because the water was coming down so hard and we had to duck our chins to our chest and breathe while holding hands. The rocks were very slippery, but Carlos was a champ and helped us along great. I would have been really scared if there were more than just the two of us going through because he was having to help us along. There were little caves all behind the waterfall that we got to go in. After we went under it, we got to jump off rocks into certain pools around the waterfall which was the best part. At first I said "Are we sure this is safe to jump into?" Then Carlos does a swan dive into the little pool to answer me so I said "welp, okay" and jumped in too.  It was so much fun and if you ever visit Honduras you HAVE to go the lake! Here our the pictures from the waterfall:

About to go under

terrifying.

Good thing we had Carlos to capture every one of my glorious moments.

Jumping!

under one of the caves behind it.

This pretty much sums up my experience walking under the waterfall...

Carlos diving like a champ.

Carlos was the best guide ever. I'm a giant.

A bridge across the lake.

So the following week after the lake, I got to fly home to attend two of my best friends wedding. It was so fabulous to be home and to see my friends and fam. After a week of relaxing and drinking tap water, I had to come back to Honduras and finish out the last 2 months of school. It was bittersweet leaving home to come back, but it was good to see my class when I got back. 

We took a mini vacation this past weekend to Tegucigalpa,the capital of Honduras. It's supposed to be the town where all of the Honduran wealth is and violence. But we didn't leave our fancy hotel all weekend. We stayed at the InterContinental… fanciest hotel I've ever stayed in my whole life! A-M-AZING. We literally did not leave the hotel all weekend. We laid around in our big, comfy beds watching tv. We went swimming in their fancy, schmancy pool. We ate way too large of portions at the continental breakfast buffet… we acted like we had never been out in public before at breakfast each morning, smuggling out pastries and cute little jars of jam. It was a restaurant continental breakfast, what?!? So awesome. We were just so baffled that we were in Honduras living like queens. Well I lied when I said we didn't leave the hotel… we did walk across the street the MALL! It was a totally normal mall, just like back home, but with Honduran stores of course. We walked over there each day to eat in the food court where they had delicious American fast food. So good.  We also got to dress up and look cute.. just to go downstairs and eat for an hour.. then head back upstairs to watch tv on a Saturday night. Livin the dream. We almost cried when we had to leave Sunday and head back to the not so glorious part of Honduras where we live. But it was really nice to see a semi-normal/developed city here.  Good times. Here are some pics from Tegucigalpa.

chicks

So our neighbor kids come over almost every night to play with us and to get a decent meal in their bellies. Well they came over last night and brought some little friends along with them... baby chicks. Not just any chicks, dyed chicks. There was a purple, pink and yellow one (yes the yellow was dyed too). It was quite a sight. Apparently they used to dye chicks back in the day for Easter in the United States, but stopped because they realized it was bad for the chicks and hurting them. Oh but in Honduras, anything goes. These poor baby chicks were chirping non stop and shaking because they were so scared. Sergio kept saying they were cold and he thought that was why they were shaking. haha. It was awful. Come to find out, they started out with 4 chicks but the 2 year old, Estefany, apparently murdered one earlier in the day. Yes murdered. She squeezed it too tight and straight up killed it. Every time she would pick them up last night, she was holding them so tight or just holding them by their heads. It was painful to watch. Ada kept dropping hers all over the place. I would put money on it that they didn't make it through the night. Needless to say, we enjoyed playing with the poor little chicks and I'm sure we all probably caught some weird chicken disease now. Here are some pics of the chicks. Enjoy and please don't call PETA on us. thanks.

Semana Santa In Guatemala

Sorry I have not written on this thing in 10 years. After the science fair, I got busy with report cards and laziness. But now I'm back in action, don't fret mom. Last week we had off for about 10 days for Semana Santa, which means Holy Week in Espanol. They go all out down here in Central America for the whole week before Easter Sunday. This is why we got ourselves a nice little vacay. A group of 5 girls, including myself, took a little trip over to Guatemala for the break.

Let me just start off by saying that every time we leave Honduras, it makes me realize more and more how far behind Honduras really is as a developing country. As soon as you cross the border, you can really see how Honduras is the poorest of the poorest in Central America. It makes me sad because every other country is working towards bettering themselves while Honduras is sort of rotting away and not improving.

Needless to say, Guatemala is absolutely beautiful. We spent half the week at Lake Atitlan and the rest in Antigua. Lake Atitlan is sort of a hippy area that has pretty much been taken over by gringos. We stayed in a town called San Pedro on the lake. A lot of the restaurants and hostels are owned by Europeans, Americans or other white people. But if you walk 5 minutes up the hill to the middle of the town, you will find Indigenous Mayan people. Talk about awesome. The women are all dressed in their traditional clothing and it was so neat to see. The lake was full of AMAZING food. We kayaked to another town on the lake which turned out to be a bad idea because it was super windy that created crazy waves. My friend Colleen and I were in a 2 seater kayak and at one point I didn't think we would make it to shore. We got about half way across the lake and we couldn't go any further. Every time a boat would pass I would yell for help, kinda kidding but secretly hoping they would really stop. No one did. Thankfully we finally made it back ashore and my arm muscles are super strong now... or at least they should be. We also made a bad decision of hiking a dormant volcano at 3am to see the sunrise. We were told that waking up at 3am was totally worth the view when the sun was rising. So we gave in to peer pressure and tried it out. The dang hike was straight up and down. About 4 hours in the hike, the sun started to rise but we couldn't see it because we were still an hour away from the top stuck in the woods. I wanted to cry. I thought all my organs were going to fall out of my butt about 2 hours in. Hiking that volcano was one of the worse decisions of my life. Yes, it was worse than the horseback riding decision in El Salvador. I think I fell at least 15 times. My leg was all scratched up and bleeding. We finally made it to the top 5 hours later... sat there for about 30 minutes and came back down. Our legs were like gumby when we got to the bottom. We were all in bad moods, dirty from head to toe, hungry, and of course worn out like no other. I decided then and there that I was not made for mountain climbing. Other than the hike, I absolutely loved the lake and want to go back again some day.

After the lake, we traveled to Antigua where all the Holy Week festivities were happening. They have the biggest Semana Santa celebration in Central America. Every day they had processionals throughout the streets. Thousands of people were in the town that week for the celebrations. It was such a cool experience. They even had processionals at 4 in the morning one day. My favorite thing about it were the sawdust carpets in the streets called alfombras. They are designs made out of dyed sawdust. People would work on them all night long and then the processional parades would walk all over them and they would be remade differently each day. They were up and down the streets everywhere you went. So cool. The whole experience was definitely a great one and would advise anyone to experience Antigua during Holy Week.

The view from the top of the Volcano... might look pretty but so not worth it!

The view of San Pedro on the lake

An indigenous woman in the market.

Two young girls in the market selling fruit.

The lake.

Antigua..

An alfombra being worked on in the streets. Some of it is designed by hand and some of the parts they use big stencils.

Antigua was so colorful!

My favorite picture of the trip. The cobblestone streets looked so beautiful after a rain and all the kids were playing in the puddles.

Another alfombra.. they would sit or lay on wood to hover over their work.

During one of the processionals on Good Friday. They all wore black on this day for the mourning of Christ. They carried tons of these floats for each parade.. marching to a beat by a live marching band. It was amazing.