¡Hola de Honduras!

Hola all my dear amigos!

Sorry about my lack of updates so far—with only about an hour a week to either be on the internet or call my parents its hard, especially because my laptop was dead for about a month so I couldn’t even write things before hand. But now it has mysteriously resurrected! Sounds like a story I heard once. So all glory be for that! But onto things, I have so much to tell you!

So I’ve been here down at the Finca for almost two months now which is pretty hard to believe. If you want to see where I am in the country, look up where Trujillo, Honduras is, that’s the closest town. So we’re right on the northern Caribbean coast of the country literally—the beach is about a 10 second walk to my front door and I fall asleep to the sound of the waves every night. I also wake up to the sound of about 25 roosters screaming outside my window at 5am every morning. When it’s a nice day its absolutely gorgeous, but it’s rainy season here so on average we only get like one or two of those a week. So most days it rains all day , and usually a couple days a week we have no running water because it just goes out from the rain. But yes, on a regular basis I have running water and electricity! Only cold water for showers which is the worst part of my day (or every 4 days) because it can actually be pretty chilly out when its rainy. Chilly meaning upper 60s. But today is really nice and its weird that I’m still wearing shorts and a t-shirt and tomorrow is December.

Anyway, onto more interesting things! So I live here in a house with 21 other American (and one little adorable Mexican) volunteers all in their 20s. Although five are leaving in a couple weeks because they’ve finished their two years here. Picture Real World minus all the drama and cool house and with like three times the people. So the Finca is kind of like set up in a compound type fashion.We have a church, a primary school, a jr. high, a clinic, a food bodega (where we keep all our food and sell it to the surrounding community), an office with a little convent attached where our three adorable nuns live, and then six small houses that all our kids live in with two Honduran house parents that are divided up by age and gender. Then we have a big soccer field in the middle of the property that as you can probably imagine gets used a lot. They love them some soccer down here. We’re in a really, really rural area, 30 minutes by car on a really crappy dirt road gets you to the closest town which is not exactly a bustling metropolis. But it does have some small grocery stores and a couple internet cafes that I think we probably provide 50% of the business for.

So we all have different jobs around the Finca taking care of our 50ish little bundles of joy. Most of us are teachers, social workers, maintenance workers, or do community outreach. Next year (meaning starting in Feb, the school year goes from Feb to the end of Oct) I’m going to be teaching third and fourth grade in our primary school. Yes, I will be teaching children! English, math (yes math…Mr. Reca would be so proud, and probably horrified), and health. And religion to 1^st and 2^nd graders so like singing Jesus loves me this I know. I think I’ll have 7 or 8 fourth graders and 8 or 9 third graders. We have about 120 kids that go to our school, only about a third of them live at the Finca—the rest are children of the people who live in the surrounding poor community. So since our kids are on winter vacation (think our summer vacation) for a few months, the two other new teachers and I have been doing winter camp for all our kids under 12. All of you who did RAMP or like summer programs (so like all of you) can understand how wearing this is on your sanity. But it´s fun, we do alot of coloring and hula hooping and mangling Spanish. I think I’m going to feel like I’m a counselor at sleep away camp for two years, thats what everyone has said its pretty much like.

Happy Thanksgiving a few days ago! And before any of you pity my being away from home and having no way to celebrate, let me tell you that I was probably just as stuffed on Thanksgiving as I normally am at home. When you have 20 plus Americans living somewhere, they will find a way to celebrate Thanksgiving. Ours involved a lot of planning since we were feeding like 60 people (we invite all our neighbors and all the house parents here). We all divided up into teams of two or three to cook specific things, I was on mashed potatoes which involved washing, cutting, boiling and mashing about 90 potatoes. We had three turkeys, stuffing, the potatoes, green been casserole, butter corn rolls, cranberry sauce, gravy, and like 6 pumpkin pies and 5 apple pies. It was awesome considering our diet usually consists of massive amounts of rice, beans and cabbage prepared in different ways. Anyway, Thanksgiving was awesome and I totally appreciated it way more than I do in the states. Oh also all the volunteers played a game of football while everyone watched earlier in the day and I didn’t suck that bad!! I caught the ball like 3 times!! And my team won! It was a great day. But don’t worry, I’m not becoming athletic or anything, pretty much all the volunteers go running like 5 times a week and I have yet to subject myself to that once.

So that’s about it, life in Honduras is pretty good. I get to see gorgeous plans and animals (and some not gorgeous ones like 7 foot long black snakes, rats and crazy flesh eating (not really but it feels like it) ants) every day, I get to eat oranges and grapefruits that we pick off our trees, and I can go swimming in the Caribbean whenever I want (barring sun). At night when its clear you can see a crazy amount of stars and the ocean has phosphorescent algae that glows like tons of lightening bugs in the water. I’m also pretty sure our kids are the most gorgeous, adorable children on the planet. I did have a weekend of barfing and being horribly sick a few weeks ago, but besides that my health has been pretty good. And despite not having a phone, a tv (ok we have a TV but we only watch movies every two weekends), the internet or anywhere to go, we find ways to entertain ourselves. We play a lot of games and cards, I get to do a lot of sudoku and crossword puzzles and reading, we cut each other’s hair, have idiotic photo shoots, listen to music, tell stories, etc. Oh and also last week someone procured a pirated DVD of the new James Bond movie so we got to watch that! But like 15 minutes were inexplicably dubbed in German, and like 10 minutes was totally scrambled because the disk was scratched, and then the rest of the time we only caught like 80% of the dialogue because the sound quality was so bad. So afterwards we were all trying to put together what exactly happened, but it was still really exciting. I highly recommend swinging on down here for a visit if you get the chance. I MISS YOU ALL!! I really love reading about what you all are doing when I’m able to keep it up! Also, everyone who has sent me mail...I don´t think I can tell you how much this makes my life. We get the mail every Thursday and it pretty much is what makes my week. I got a Thanksgiving card from Mrs. Sherman on Thursday with a crossword puzzle from the post and the comics inside and it was one of the greatest things I´ve ever gotten in the mail, I almost cried.

Love you guys! I hope you’re all enjoying being able to listen to Christmas music now! Keep doing awesome things and know that I´m thinking of you all!!

Winter is here

Dobriy den everybody!

Kelly's life in the Carribean is quite a contrast to my life here in Ukraine. Today was the first snowfall and I assure you I won't be wearing anything less than my heavy winter coat, winter boots and hat until the end of May. Lidiya, my host Mom, is very concerned about my ability to survive the winter on my own given the selection of winter clothes I brought and my inability to cook borsch. These last two weeks of training will be devoted to intensive Ukrainian cooking lessons. After tomorrow, I'll be able to make some mean potato pancakes, carrot salad, and these weirdly delicious cheese pancakes called tsernyky.

In Ukraine and I'm pretty sure the rest of Peace Corps you have to do some kind of community project during your training. We're having a fundraiser to raise more money for textbooks since the ones they have are terrible and are filled with erroneous information!Maps of the U.S. show Washington D.C. in Michigan. Anyway, our fundraiser is a concert/school dance/talent show/ student teacher trivia game challenge. I'm in some way involved in all of these activities on stage so wish me luck! I think I might have to play a piano solo on a piano that has about 50% of the keys out of tune and I definitely have to sing a song in Ukrainian about a boy who loves women and cheese pies.

tarantulas and family vacations

So, I am guessing you all got my massive email update with the details of my new life in an artisan village.  But since that email there has been 2 life changing events, which I will now relinquish!!!!!!  So enjoy this insider scoop.

Thursday, Nov. 13th.  It was a dark stormy night, with a hint of danger in the air.  Well it was at least dark.  Because my artisans decide to have their meetings at 530pm, which really means 6pm in an outside tiki hut with no lights.  So since its nearing winter the days are getting shorter, which my artisans may have forgotten because its still 80 degrees at night.  I can't blame them, I don't believe winter really exists either since I still can't walk outside midday without melting.  But regardless of our beliefs the sun still knows its winter time and about 15 minutes into our meeting its pitch black.  So this meeting involves a lot of fighting, jumping topic to topic, literally jumping and all in very fast spanish.  I was in the dark very much literally and figuratively.  After all this confusion, I also had to coordinate who of my artisans were coming with me to an art fair in the capital next week and get all their information which I had to pass on to the director of the fair.  Luckily, this didn't cause as much trouble as I thought it would, but still doing this all in the dark, especially just writing personal information down correctly with out light was a bit challenging, and interpreting dominican spanish.  So needless to say, I left this meeting quite stressed.  

I drudge home, in a bit of a bad mood and frustrated with my spanish ability.  I rush to my room to shower and relax.  I lock the door, and am about to change when I spy with my little eye a massive tarantula on the wall behind the door.  Now when I say massive, im not lying (it was mildly smaller than the size of my face)!  And it was not intimidated, unlike myself.  My spanish mother, knocks on the door telling me my dinner is ready, and I respond in spanish "I have a problem, but I don't know the words."  My fear struck me dumb, and I could not for the life of me remember the word for spider.  And I couldn't open the door, because was afraid the monster might jump, because apparently they do that.  I can handle jumping artisans but not jumping tarantulas.  So I frantically flip through my spanish- dictionary and eureka if find the word "arana with a tilda over the n"  (just in case you find yourself in the same position).  So I scream "Theres a big spider behind my door."  My mom responds with "O".  And then quickly grabs a key, and rushes into my room, and tells me to leave that she will take care of it.  She takes a plank piece from the door, and swiftly tries to impail the spider.  But apparently they are inimpailable, but I still took a picture of it being squished because it seemed we had the upper hand at the time (and i figured I could send it to the spider later to bring up painful memories muahaha).  Since it wouldn't die though, my mom had to do a heroic and skillful maneuver of "guiding" the tarantula and scooting it out of the house as it was walking.  She gave it a last kick, to let it know it wasn't welcome back around these parts.  And then all was safe and well.  Although, I almost suffered a hear attack, the unwelcomed spider did act as a great stress reliever.  My family and I had a great laugh from this episode and proceeded to have an hour of fun insect stories as I enjoyed my dinner of fried salami (which I actually like now, although I am sure my arteries will suffer after 2 years).   So I guess moral to the story, if you are feeling stressed just always remember that moody jumping artisans are never as bad as jumping tarantulas, so and at least you dont have to coordinate getting them to a fair.  

My other new experience of the week, was a dominican family reunion and trip to the beach.  Now my friend Gori has a bunch of family in town, because its the one year anniversary of her uncle's death and they have a really big all day ceremony.  So most her family from the states came and are staying for a few weeks.  Now her family is a party, literally.  Every night they are partying way into the night, and I usually try to only stay for a tiny bit if at all normally because I try not to drink in my community, and some of the NY uncles and cousins can get a little fresh.  But the family was nice enough to invite myself and the volunteer, Cati, who I am following up to join their family trip to the beach, Nagua.  Now I was a little hesitant because I knew this trip might would be more or less a shit show, but Cati convinced me to come, and she is really sweet and responsible, so I figured a free trip to a beach I haven't to been to, sure why not.  And I knew it would at least interesting.  Basically, I was not disappointed.  First we fit 19 of us and 1 baby snuggly into 1 van!  And then of course around 10:30, the wine and the straight rum start flowing in the van.  Actually it is quite a skill these people have, of drinking out of small cups, while driving over dominican roads (which is normally much rockier that a thirty year old roller coaster) and not spilling at all!  I definitely have not mastered it, but im getting better.  Also along with the wine (which is basically liquor because its so strong and in one gallon containers), there was cheese and crackers were going around, which made me quite happy.  So basically, as road trips go, it was pretty enjoyable.  Then we roll up and pile out into the house of a relative, where there procedes to be more sitting around and drinking until finally make it to the beach.  The family at the beach was a blast!  Now Cati and I, were I think the only ones with bathing suits, but that didn't stop the family from being in the water, swimming with clothes apparently is the norm.  And laying out and relaxing was not the norm.  We basically just splashed around and played lots of chicken.  I tried to teach one of the brothers to swim, but it didnt go so well.  I asked him how dominicans expect to get off the island, if none of them can swim.   He didnt answer and just laughed.  Anyways the beach was a lot of fun, and then we all had a big dominican style late lunch of rice and chicken and bussled on home like one big happy family.  Well we had to carry the grandfather and the aunt into the van, because they were sloshed.  The way back was fun, not horribly eventful.  The now warm wine and rum started flowing again (i stuck to gatorade), and many fun dominican car games, but I don't have their kind of energy so I took a nap.  But then was awaken to a cousin serenading me.  All and all it was a good old family fun day with a crazy dominican family.  They kept partying into the night, but Cati and I opted for having a pj party with my little sisters, making popcorn, and watching the classic dance drama "Step Up."  And then this of course was followed by a dance party.

Well for know thats all from the Caribbean!

<3

Kelly