My Second Casa Copaneca

This has been coming for a little while but I can finally tell you all! I moved this weekend into another house down here in Copan. It’s a long story and I don’t really need to get into all the details but Tyler and I were feeling pretty awkward in our living situation with a guy down here so we decided to talk to him last week. It was just a weird conversation and for the sake of all of us we decided to move out and find a new place. We decided on Wednesday last week to talk with the school and see about moving and here we are, six days later, sitting in our very own apartment. We’re living with a third teacher from the school, Blair, and our apartment is even sweeter than the previous location. We have three bedrooms, three bathrooms, huge living room, nice dining room and kitchen, plus a freaking rooftop! On our roof there’s a hammock and really just a sweet view of the city and a nice place to hang out when it’s not too hot. I’ll have to post pictures as soon as I can. The place is closer to the city, which is a little downside because things will be more expensive, but the plus is it’s right by an awesome restaurant called Picame, which has awesome burgers and baleadas.:) When you come visit now, yes you, there will be a spare bed downstairs in which you can sleep without any problems.
My one hope is that we don’t turn into a huge hangout place for all of the American teachers down here. I really like the connections that we have made with the Honduran teachers and I want to keep that up. I’m hoping to still make time on the weekends for visits to all of the teachers houses and time to hang out with various families. I’m sad to be leaving all of the families that we’ve gotten to know in the area around where we were living, but this will be such a better situation. Woo sweet houses and our very own apartment!

Ants, Rain, Cigars, and Sleeping

Last week a kid in my class says, “Look! Ants!” I was thinking a couple of ants, but what he meant was actually about 5,000 ants in the corner of my room! These were of course the biting ants, is there another kind that would infest my room? As kids start to stomp on the ants the realize the ants bite and quickly decide to stop walking through the huge patch of ants. Then we go outside and see ants climbing all over the wall! There must have been around 30,000 ants climbing all over the wall and in my classroom! We went back into the classroom to see if they were leaving and they started to fall from the ceiling! Ants were crawling along the crossbeams and there were so many that ants were being pushed off and falling onto tables and people. Teodoro (guard) used a whole can of Raid in the room and still there were ants all over. After about an hour or so they were all gone. Teodoro told me that it means rain is coming and he predicted rain that night…
Later that night it did not rain, but the next night it did! It wasn’t quite the rain storm I was hoping for, but it was a decent amount of rain.
This past weekend Tyler and I went to Santa Rosa de Copan, which is about 2-3 hours away from here on the bus. On the way there I got car sick and threw up on two different buses out the window. When we got there Tyler and I each didn’t feel good so we took a three hour nap! I figured that I wasn’t feeling good from being carsick, but I slept 10 hours that night and woke up with a little bit of a soar throat. Things haven’t gotten any better since then, although they haven’t gotten much worse either. I was going to brave it out today at school but instead decided to come home early and have the librarian sub for me. She can handle the little squirts for a couple hours.:)
As for the cigars, when we were in Santa Rosa we took a tour of the cigar factory there in town. They make around 60 or 70,000 completely hand-made cigars each day. There are over 150 different brands of cigars made in the factory and they are shipped out all over the world. Some of the cigars are sold for upwards of $3 or 4 each…that seems like a lot to me for getting cancer. There has to be a cheaper way.:) Still, Tyler and I both got free cigars for going on the tour and I’m not too sure what to do with it. It’s gigantic and just sitting in my bag still right now. Maybe I’ll give it to one of the kids at school as a prize…kids love that sort of thing.:)

An Eventful Weekend of Food and Hospitality

Yay for holidays and extended weekends, that’s the main theme of this past weekend. We were supposed to have Friday off for a holiday but found out last Wednesday that instead we had this Monday off and not Friday. I was super bummed at first, but it all worked out just fine. Tyler and I cooked up some more of the famous Sue Anne Sticky Buns to take around for people at school. Our first stop was once again Norma’s house. It was so great! We spent about an hour and a half there hanging out and glancing at TV as Cecia (5th grade daughter) was watching Princess Diaries 2. We picked up some oranges, cheese, and cream (for baleadas). The even better part, she invited us over for dinner on Saturday night! I’m so excited about that! People around here do everything I’m pretty sure. I complain about lack of free time but Norma is married with two kids, sub-director of the school, teaches several classes (not sure how many exactly) and takes 5 classes at the university on the weekends. Holy freaking moly she is busy. From Norma’s our next stop was Mirian’s house, which we had not visited up to this point. She invited us over to her house yesterday and when we said we can stop by around 11 or 12 she said that she would cook up a little lunch, “Do you like pasta?” She asked. Well by cooking up a little lunch she really meant that she was going to make the worlds most amazing pasta with awesome potatoes, incredible sauce, a little salad on the side, with a coke and lime. It was great to get to hang out at her place, speak some Spanish, hear more about her life and family. From there it was on to Suly’s place for one more house visit. We had yet to visit her house and it was great to find it and meet her mom who she lives with! Suly is super nice and it was a fun time to hang out and relax at her place. We were going to head to Nora’s place for one last stop but decided against it as time was running short. We told her that we would visit, so we have rolls to take her tomorrow and then we’ll stop by her place another day.
Who are all these people you may be asking…well Norma I’ve talked about before I believe, so I’ll skip her and fill you in about Mirian and Suly.
Mirian: she has worked at Mayatan as an assistant for somewhere between 10 and 15 years, I get mixed stories. Her daughter graduated back in ’97 and she has one younger daughter in fourth grade there. Her husband was killed in an accident quite a while ago, 10 plus years, and she hasn’t remarried since then. She lives in a modest house about 10 minutes from our place, if you walk fast.:) She also has two other jobs, at Comercial Copan (a fabric, appliance, clothing, etc store) and a tobacco store in a little café for tourists.
Suly: she is the kindergarten assistant in the morning at Mayatan. She is friends with Megan and Viki, which is how I first met her, but now she’s my friend too!:) She’s been at Mayatan for a while now and is super friendly! Her birthday is May 7…in case you’re wondering…She owns three little parakeet type birds, one that just arrived from a person in Ostuman yesterday. Hence that one has received the name from me, Senor Ostuman.
Once again this past weekend has been filled with generosity and hospitality. Yay for that.:)

Teaching and Pinatas

We have entered yet another week of teaching and the infamous search for a third teacher is not going so hot right now. After Emory told me there was a problem with the kinder teacher moving and her daughter coming to teach kinder I talked with the kinder teacher today and she sounds like she would enjoy teaching science and her daughter wants to teach kinder. So what’s the problem? The world may never know. It’s one of those secrets that goes down in history along with how many licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop (1, 2, *crunch*, 3).
I talked to Teodoro yesterday for a little while. He’s the security guard at school and apparently he has 11 kids! ELEVEN! Four of them are grown and out of the house, one is in second grade at Mayatan, then three are at the public school ranging from first to sixth grade. The other three are at the house but working, I suppose. His second grade son is having a birthday on Saturday and I made a joke with him that there was going to be a big fiesta and pinata! Well then I felt bad, because Teodoro told me his family can’t afford a pinata. I think that I’m going to buy them one to take to him at work tomorrow or Wednesday so his kid can have it on Thursday with the family. That would be fun, yah?
I was also a heathen this weekend according to local Evangelicals. I went to the Catholic Mass and I’ve already had at least 10 people ask me about it. Some are Catholics and were really interested in me going and wondered what I thought of it. Others are Evangelicals that are asking “if I go to many churches that worship idols.” I was a little taken aback by that much hostility. I knew that people around here didn’t get along with each other in that regard, but people here are super over the top with the not getting along part! It’s not such a great thing. I loved the Catholic Mass though and I’m planning on going to the Thursday evening mass at 7. Lourdes, one of the cleaning ladies, said that she goes there and is friends with the priest so if I want to meet him we can do that some time pretty soon. She said he would be very excited to meet me because while the Evangelical churches have all sorts of short term mission teams come down here to work and bring money the Catholic church doesn’t have that luxury. So he will be very excited to have an American or two in the service. I’m not sure if that is using me or not, but I don’t even care, I want to go cause I loved the service. I will talk more about what it’s like in my next post or two after I’ve gone to a couple masses.