Gracias, Lempira, Honduras

Yep... this blog will be a long one! Amy and I just returned from a two week volunteer trip to Gracias, Lempira, Honduras! Amy gets to work with another teacher who spent the first two years of her teaching career at a bilingual school in Gracias, Honduras. She returns to the school almost every summer and works to do summer programs and to prepare orientation for teachers and set up class rooms for the upcoming school year. Amy and I were lucky enough to get to travel to Honduras with her this year and spend some time with the people of Gracias and helping at the school! RaeAnne (the teacher-friend) is basically a saint to take us with her since neither Amy nor I know any Spanish and have never been to Central America before! The school was started by a woman from the Netherlands who wanted a better education for her two boys than the public schools were able to offer. I have tons and tons of respect for this woman. Not only does she own a very fancy hotel and restaurant… but she also founded the Villa Verde School to educate her children and other children in Gracias. I am so impressed she wants to rise above and become better… BUT she doesn’t just raise herself, she takes the whole community with her!! I know I saw a couple people getting “deals” at the restaurant and there are TONS of students at the school on “scholarship” or discounts because some families can’t afford to send their children to the school, but still wanted the opportunity for a finer education. Isn’t this woman impressive?!

It was an adventure! Not only did we get to meet wonderful people like Frony (the Hotel/Restaurant/School owner), but we also got to see lots of dogs, BIG GUNS, machetes, dogs, beautiful rain forests and dogs! We got to ride around on the adventurous “chicken buses”, take motor taxi’s (they look a lot like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland… but the ride in Honduras is a little more wild!!), and explore a nearby cloud forest (“explore” could be interchanged for “death hike”)! I for sure have a new love for showers with warm water, toilets that flush TP, a garbage and sewage system, bug repellant, carpet floors, and soft beds without bed bugs.

The scariest memory of Honduras:
We got to see a lot of SUPER CREEPY guys on our trip as well as a lot a lot A LOT of dogs running around (dogs are one of my BIGGEST fears… right up there with moose)! Luckily I think the dogs actually healed me of my fear of dogs… Amy and I were even almost attacked by a dog one day and I stood my ground and didn’t run away… first time EVER that I’ve done that in my life!! Anyway… despite all this I think the scariest memory would be an event mostly transformed from my wild imagination! Do you remember the Babysitter Club book about the scary stocker guy who would prank people on the phone and then stock them? I remember the Club made up a secret password so in case they felt like the stocker guy was in the house, the babysitter would call another club member and say the magic password (something to do with a blue ribbon or something…) and then the Club members would come rescue her and save the day! Well… one dark and stormy night Amy and I were in our hotel room… alone. RaeAnne (our Spanish interpreter) had gone out to visit friends late in the evening. A heavy rain storm hit the town and it rained for a good part of the night. Amy and I had gone to bed… but before going to bed we had locked down our room… which is funny because the door has a lot of locks, but the windows are just screens (the glass portion of the window just swings open like a door)… so if you really wanted to break into a room one would only need to jump through the screen window… which was right next to my bed! Anyway the phone rang after Amy and I were asleep. I answered the phone and heard a man speaking Spanish. I picked out the few words I could recognize… friend, RaeAnne, Room #6… yep, that was about it, I had no idea what this man was saying. I repeated back in English what I thought he might be saying… “RaeAnne? Room #6? Yep! RaeAnne is gone, can I leave her a message?” Yah… embarrassingly enough I actually said these things. Needless to say the conversation didn’t go too well. The man spoke a whole bunch more Spanish and finally hung up after an awkwardly long silence. Amy woke up so I repeated the conversation to her… some man called and knows RaeAnne is gone and that we’re in Room #6. … Hmmm, Freaky! Instantly the haunting memory of the Babysitter Club books returned to my mind! We were totally going to be murdered!! That was the murderer calling us!! He was on his way! The mystery man called back a couple times (like 5 or 6) and would hang up when I answered! He was pranking us now!! Probably he was getting closer and closer to our room!! I lay there on my bed in the dark listening to the rain… what was I going to do? The hotel rooms are spread out all through these cute jungle paths… the rooms near us were vacant and we were far from the hotel restaurant and very far from the hotel office. The Honduran police are supposedly organized corruption… I didn’t speak any Spanish so I couldn’t call for help anyway. RaeAnne was clear across town somewhere. I began rehearsing in my mind Kung-Fu and karate moves I had seen in movies; that was all I could do, I would have to defend our hotel room and save the day from the prankster murderer! I realized how quickly one can go from feeling content to feeling totally alone, unprotected and threatened. There was no escape. Eventually after a lot of phone pranking RaeAnne called us… apparently the man at the front desk of the hotel had been trying to connect us to RaeAnne the whole time but was having a difficult time figuring out how to transfer the lines over. Luckily I didn’t have to fight off any scary prankers… but I did count my blessings for feelings of peace and safety and for police officers and nice neighbors back home!

My favorite activity in Honduras:
I loved helping with the school and meeting people around town and getting to eat in people’s homes and growing to love the people of Gracias. I think my favorite activity was actually hiking to the cloud forest. Apparently the hike is supposed to be a 2-3 day hike (people there must like to stop and take in their surroundings a lot when they hike or something… You’d really have to be walking slow to drag the hike out that long). Amy and I arranged for a guide to take us up the mountain (as was recommended by both locals and tourists)… but the day before the hike the guide fell through and no one else in Gracias was willing to approach the mountain, so Amy and I obtained a really simple sketch of the mountain and the trail we were to take. The two of us hiked the mountain… it was a blast! We got lost and ended up taking a trail that I swear was for mountain goats… that thing was so long and steep, steep, steep beyond belief!! (I wonder if mountain goats even live in a rain forest…) We each had to find sticks to wave in front of us to clear away the spider webs and we wore our jackets for most of the hike to protect us from the swarms and swarms of mosquitoes!! It rained almost the entire hike (imagine that… rain in a rain forest!) but we had so much fun!! We actually lived through the experience and hiked to the cloud forest… this is the highest peak in Honduras and the highest cloud forest as well. We wanted to hike to the cloud forest so Amy could take pictures for her class (they study rain forests in 1st grade)… but the funniest part of our hike was that we didn’t even take any pictures in the cloud forest! By the time we got there we were so exhausted it seemed like WAY too much work to pull out the camera! It was a fun hike though… incredibly green with the most beautiful sounding birds!! Some birds actually sounded like flutes! We were so glad to live through the hike and to see open spaces again (it was a little dark with thick foliage in the cloud forest).

(Amy enjoying a view on our hike... notice the jacket, it was NOT cold outside, we wore the jackets to protect ourself from all the exciting swarms of bugs!)

(These are children sitting on the highway barrier waiting for buses/cars to stop... they then run out and sell pop, food, newspapers, toys... pretty much anything and everything.)

The biggest surprise of Honduras:
I think the biggest surprise of our trip was how trash is disposed of! After we arrived in Honduras we spent the next day taking buses to Gracias, Lempira. Around lunch time our bus pulled over at a bus stop and vendors flocked the inside and outside of the bus. A cute family sitting across the aisle from us had two little boys who bought a chicken lunch on a Styrofoam platter. As our bus departed from the bus stop I was having a fun time watching the cute little boys eat their lunch… and was shocked out of my mind when the older brother finished his lunch, opened the window, and DUMPED the plate and trash right out the window! I admit… I had childhood dreams of doing the same thing… but his kid actually did it!! He was totally calm about the whole event. I nudged Amy and told her what just happened. THEN the kid took his little brother’s lunch, opened the window and disposed of the trash the same way!! SERIOUS! Right out the window! Amy and I were dying! We then noticed the streets… they were all lined with trash!! EVERYONE (including parents) throws their trash on the ground. I think I saw one public trash can the entire time we were in Honduras! Crazy huh? The area is extremely beautiful and green and rain-foresty… but the streets are totally lined with trash and debris!

(This is the bus preacher WITH his shirt on... we were lucky and got nice buses on this strech of road!)

Ok… one more shocking story! This is was on the same bus ride! Once our bus departed San Pedro Sula (the city we flew into) Amy and I were enjoying the scenery and bus adventure. Not too far into our bus ride a man stood up with a Bible and started calling people to be saved. Amy and I avoided eye contact since we don’t speak Spanish AND we had no idea what this man was aggressively yelling about (except that he had a Bible). He was nicely dressed and even had an ironed shirt that was tucked in. After about 15 minutes of this man’s speech Amy made some comment about how he would be a perfect candidate for one of my religious tattoos (yet another dream job for another day). I thought was a random comment until I looked up and discovered the bus preacher had NO SHIRT!! He was walking around the bus showing everyone his tattoos while he was calling them to repentance. (Apparently his tattoo visual aides were US gang tattoos and because he was marked he couldn’t get a job in Honduras except with the churches… maybe he was paralleling that with the Atonement??). Anyway once he got his shirt back on I snuck my camera up between the seats and snapped a picture of him! Crazy!! Amy and I were thinking it might be handy for the missionaries to get Plan of Salvation tattoos for their discussions… nothing like a little shock factor when discussing religion!

My favorite thing about Gracias:
My favorite thing about Gracias was the people. It was fun to meet new people and to really get to study them. Since I didn’t know the language I got to spend the whole time looking at facial expressions and really looking into people’s eyes to see what they might be saying. I loved the opportunity to get to spend so much time in Honduras and I loved that RaeAnne knew so many people and would drag us around with her and introduce us. The people were so generous and so giving of their love. I loved getting to visit happy people… laughter was one thing I could translate… I never knew what people were laughing about, but it always felt good to laugh!