A few more weeks.

Sorry about the recent drop in blog writing.

Monday:

Another day off, how great is that! That was until I had messed up dates for my site visit again. I seriously must have confused it four or five times. I call my counterpart to let him know that my boss would be coming and needed to talk to him for a little bit, and he tells me that there might be a meeting that he needs to attend, and if not, the meeting wouldn’t happen due to threats of roadblocks. Ahh, I’m ready for the political mess to end. I finally cooked something decent that night. I have been eating really bad, and finally put the energy into making something different for a change.

Tuesday:

Site visit day. I had decided I would get up early, do some things before Carlos got here, and then the morning came, and that got nixed fast. Then, I remember that I forgot to tell me Mom that Carlos was coming, so I do that and she is worrying because he would be here in the house in an hour and she was still in her pajamas, and then the housekeeper was dealing with family business out of town, so the house wasn’t as clean as normal. It was cute.

I go to the office and he shows up within minutes. We go over some really basic stuff. How are you doing? How is integrating into your sites? Any safety and security concerns? How goes the Spanish? Nothing too exciting. Then we talked with Walter. I tried telling Carlos he would say I was perfect (except for not drinking coffee) and Walter’s answers were all positive. Then on to the family’s house, where the comments were even more glowing (go host Mom!). Next: lunch. Well, we don’t have anything too great here in town, just your normal stuff, but in the city 10 minutes away, I had heard rumors of a good place to eat meat. I have had a definite lack of meat, so that is where I wanted to go. I forgot how good meat can be. Best meat I have had in Honduras without doubt. It’s expensive so I wont be returning too soon.

The rest of the day was chilling out, enjoying that happy feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want to make dinner because I knew it couldn’t compare to lunch. That night my family had a birthday party here in the house. Now, my Mom has a group of ladies come over ever Tuesday for a church group, so I thought it was that, until I went to the kitchen and saw all of the stuff they had out. I did get some cake and ice cream!

Wednesday:

Back to Gold Creek. It’s a beautiful place, with good people, and monkeys in the jungle, but it is a long way away. Up and at’ hem very early. We go, have to go back to the dam site for some strange reason (still don’t understand why) and the theodolite we are borrowing for right now is different than mine, so I had to sit there and stare and think for a while to figure out how to use it. I think I figured something out. Then walking to do a re-route of the distribution network. Then doing even odder things at the tank site (after we decided which spot it would be at). This is where I saw my first live snake here in Honduras (I have been lucky). This is how the situation goes:

Stage: We are on a hill covered with brush, I am a few feet away from Walter who is leveling the theodolite.

Jill: Ahhhh!

Walter: Que paso? (What happened, literally what passed?)

Jill: Un serpiente paso! (A snake passed, I just like the way I could use paso in a different way and make it sound so snazzy, it might not translate right). For those of you wondering, the grammatically correct answer would have been Un serpiente me paso.

I moved really fast and then was constantly searching the ground for some of its friends that might still be slithering about.

We returned to town kind of late, but it was just as the Honduras vs Costa Rica World Cup elimination match started. Ok, I just started the computer back up again to mention this game. It was not what I expected. In the past Honduras has had a problem finishing games, allowing games in the last minutes. Not today! Two goals in extra time of the second period. For those of you who don’t watch soccer, extra time is that little bit of time that is added onto the halves to account for time lost during penalties, players faking injuries, etc. This is normally 3 minutes or so. Honduras scored twice during this. The second time, I was just like, there is no way that just happened. They beat Costa Rica, which if I remember right, had beaten every other team in our group (group includes the USA). Crazy. I am going to get a paper tomorrow to see if they are going to South Africa (site of tournament) or not. The announcer said that they were closer to going, but someone today told me that they had to win, and the US as well, for them to get through, but the US lost. I didn’t see that game, but it upsets me that they lost to Mexico.

Thursday I went to the office a little bit, and listened to a lesson on how to calculate volumes for about 10 minutes. Then they were going to move into a smaller room, and I decided I’d rather go home and study Spanish, than listen to that in a tiny room packed with people.

Friday was weird because I was supposed to go out to do more of the water survey, but when I showed up, no one was there. I was five minutes late, but that’s normally considered early in Honduras. In the afternoon S and I planned the baseball practice. We work well as a team, and her teacher’s knowledge of ways to get kids to do things is a great resource. T is on vacation, which is why she didn’t help plan.

Wow, we just had visitors. I found out that the grandmother in this house is actually a great-great-grandmother. Crazy, huh! She is 90 years old.

Finally I have started cooking something that is not the same hot dogs or spaghetti. Like when I lived out in Washington, I was really dull in my cooking for a while, and now and starting to branch out. My attempt at papusas the other day was actually kind of a disaster. I know my family had a non-stick pan, but it has disappeared. Therefore, it stuck a lot. I was trying to find the balance between lots of oil (not good) and sticking. Maybe I could bake them, now there’s an idea. A little grease on the bottom of the pan, flipping half way through, that might just work. I still have to learn to make the salads that go on top. The first is an onion salad with jalapenos but in brine, which is great. The second is a cabbage dry cole slaw type thing. The thing with cabbage is that you are playing Russian roulette with your health. It is known here for carrying a lot of bacteria, like the type that gives you diarrhea. Therefore, it has to be cleaned really well, and if not, you probably will get sick. They kept trying to tell me during training not to eat the salad (what would be the point in that) which I chose to ignore, instead just frequenting places that have a lot of other people eating them, figuring people wouldn’t return if they got sick from the food. I haven’t tried buying it and cleaning it myself. I don’t think my family washes the fruits and veggies here, so really, I am lucky I am not really sick anyways. I just figure I am hardening my stomach and other digestion organs, so that I will be able to eat almost anything without repercussions.

Saturday

Getting up Saturday morning for baseball practice is not one of my favorite things. It did go pretty well though. We did running and stretching, then a catching throwing drill. It is still hard for the kids to put the glove with the pocket up to catch. Later we created a puzzle, and each piece had a rule or idea about baseball, and the kids each had to read one, and then put the piece together, that way the kids learned all the rules. Because I didn’t think all the kids had listened, I used the picture on the puzzle (a baseball field) to reinforce the concepts. After that was a game of extreme rock, paper, scissors which is like a mix of the normal game and rover red rover. It was fun and the kids really enjoyed it.

Later S and I planned the next practice. We tried to look up baseball practice tips, but they were all too advanced for our kids. Then after thinking about how we could build a tee to teach the them to bat, we looked for tee-ball tips which worked a lot better since they were all about teaching the basics of baseball.

Later I tried something that may sound good to a few of you, liquid captain crunch. Not what it is actually called, but that is what it tasted like. This is the beginning of corn season, with the corn festival in a few weeks. There are a lot of interesting foods made of corn right now.

That night S and I went to an India Bonita competition which is a little difficult to describe. It is kind of like a beauty pageant for the kindergarten kids, but so much more. For the dances, the kids that could memorize the steps (move like this for a part of the song, then change a little) were in the front and the others copied them from behind. There was a “questions” portion which consisted of name, dad’s name, school name, teacher’s name. Then came the real impressive parts, the kids’ Mom’s had to create these “indigenous” costumes. There really was not much reality involved. It was cute, even though it lasted 2 hours through dinner time.

Sunday

I woke up, but stayed in bed today, my only day to do so. My Mom came to my door to see if I was up, which is unusual, so I got up and dressed to see what was up. We were invited to eat carne asada at her son’s house, then to go to his finca (farm) for corn and corn tortillas. They by the way, have a mini schnauzer. So, we ate, then went to the farm, where they strung up hammocks (I think I will bring about 10 home with me so that I can have my guests all lay in hammocks) and we ate corn and corn tortillas. Now, there are corn tortillas and then there are corn tortillas. These are not made of corn flour, but of mashed up corn kernels. My host Mom was so happy that I voluntarily put mantequilla on my tortillas. It’s easy to make her happy.

Monday:

4 hours of meeting! Not exactly what I call a lot of fun. The good news is that I understood almost all this time, but I still couldn’t keep my mind from wandering off track. The mail finally came! For some reason it never got delivered to town last week. I got a letter from Megg with pics of her new house, and surprise, surprise, pics of Daisy, who will always be my first nephew, no matter how many dogs or kids come later.

Tuesday:

So, people here have an ingrained excuse for being late, it is called Hora Hondurena. Today I got myself out of bed to get to the office, only to actually leave an hour and a half later. After 20 minutes of waiting I went back home, and ate breakfast and talked to my house family. I was not about to sit around forever. So, Megg, my host Mom says that you cat looks like a dog. Never had she seen a cat so big and fat before, it must be a dog in her mind, especially with the pics of Erik walking the thing in your yard.

We finally went to a town, called the Hardship. Well, it’s the closest translation. It was kind of a disaster. No one wanted to work. It didn’t need to take a lot of time, but it did. On the way back it down-poured and the high school students riding in the back of the pick-up got soaked. At that time I wasn’t so impressed with them, and thus thought it was funny. To be nice and make up for it a little bit, they got to go home early to dry off.

I got my first, “take me to the States” request today. It was kind of weird. She was calm about it, and understood that I couldn’t. I have heard that a lot of people try to pass their kids onto volunteers, thinking they will number one get the kids out of their hair, and number two take the kids to the states with them. Luckily, this has not happened to me yet. Relax, no kid adopting for me.

Ahh, I am so tired of writing (and at this point of a very non-connected update, you are probably sick of reading) because I fell really behind on my journal; I had not written for a little over a week, and had to check back here to remember what happened which day. Also, I have started writing the drills and activities we have done in baseball, this way we can give the book to whoever replaces us as coaches for the baseball team. The best thing would be that a Honduran takes over, but it might be whoever replaces us after we leave. I was also writing another copy for a friend who is starting her team soon, and then got tired of that and said she can copy from the book. I think it will be a good resource, because it has ideas on how to teach the concepts of baseball, and other activities to keep the kids busy. We have to get creative to make up for a lack of equipment, this isn’t like the states where every kid comes with their own glove, we have to get 15 kids through a practice with 7 gloves.

Wednesday

Well, not your normal day. I got to see cow testicles being removed, then eaten. Yes, they have Rocky Mountain Oysters here too. No, I did not try them.

We were gone all day and I worked for 1 hour. Actually, it was nice because the other times I was in the hammock and eating. I have finally come to terms with mantequilla and can eat it. Next, coffee.

Thurday:

Day off! Yeah, actually I am spending it planning baseball and tennis practices.