¡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!!