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.

La Primera de Muchas

The first 5 day week of many has been survived by most. If punishment were death a couple of my kids didn’t make it through the week, but I came out just fine! They told us at the start of the year that we could hold kids after school as punishment but we are responsible for keeping them after and occupied. Two ninth graders decided to push their luck earlier this week by continuing to bother two classmates despite at least 4 warnings. I finally told them to stay after to have a little chat. I gave them the first detention of many this year I’m sure. I had them move books for me from my classroom over to the library where they’ve been needing to go for several weeks. It’s liked forced labor, but better!:) Today (Friday) four seventh graders pushed their luck and get to have a similar privilege next week. The two students I had for detention already called me mean as they left, but in a non-harsh way. I hope that they don’t have to stay after again, but they are hard workers. They tried moving the book all at once in a wheelbarrow and it fell down at least 3 times that I saw. It was pretty funny. They tried to take it down the stairs and it fell. I suggested putting it at the bottom of the stairs and then loading the books but they didn’t like that idea. Instead they wanted to tip the wheelbarrow down so all the books fell out, throwing everything off balance and causing them to fall over…oh to be a ninth grader again.:)
A lot of the kids are really enjoyable, a lot are still neutral, and there are some beyond terrible that I can’t wait to give detention! I’m starting to feel like a really mean teacher on a power streak, so I keep things in check as best as I can. I taught my 8th graders today the phrase, “it’s a cinch!” They were saying the math homework was easy, so I said, “good, it should be a cinch for you!” Their math books have still not arrived, so I’m patching together review work from last year’s seventh grade book but it’s getting too easy as more and more comes back to them. I skipped about half the book this week to get to something more challenging…like converting fractions to decimals and percents! It’s so great to teach math, I love it! Not as much as I would love having a third teacher though. If you want to come teach math you could do that.:)
Have I written anything about that? I don’t think so….Tyler and I are trying to convince Emory to hire a third secondary teacher. Right now there are 26 7th graders, soon to be 27, and the possibility of a 28th. One of the students is special needs and the possible addition is from the US and doesn’t speak any Spanish. I already feel bad for that poor girl because she is going to feel so out of place! What is she going to do for Spanish, social studies, home-ec, and various subjects taught in Spanish?! Oh my…it’s time to go get burgers! Tonight we are celebrating our survival of the whole 5 days. It was tough, but I guess I can survive for another 9 months…or so.:)

A Five Day Week?!

Are you kidding!? We actually have to go to school five straight days? This is ridiculous! I’m quitting!

Well no, I didn’t quit, but this is just getting ridiculous! We have to go to school all five days next week! That is so not fair. The first week we had 3.5 days because of hurricane Felix, then last week we only had 3 because of Children’s day and the parade, and now this week we only had 3 because of Teacher’s day and Independence Day. I’m just not cut out for this whole teaching five days per week kind of job, that’s too much for me. Luckily we have three weeks in a row with Friday off.:) Regardless of how much I want to get the time off though, I suppose that I need to go to class, I need to teach, I need to get the kids involved, and I need to not go crazy!

Today I stopped by Children’s International to see if they needed any volunteers for translating, working with children, tutoring, etc. I would like to volunteer there a couple of times per week if I could, if even just for an hour or so. I walked in, explained that I wanted to help, and a lady took me to the back. I talked to these two guys who looked fairly flabbergasted by the whole “offering to help” ordeal that I was putting them through. They said to come back on Monday when the director/coordinator will be there. I’m not entirely sure what Children’s International does, I just know that they help children. Isn’t that an amazing deduction?! I’m not a teacher for nothing.:) I think that they give out free food to families in need and then also provide a place for kids to play on the playground, study, hang out, and just try to create a network of support. From what I know of it I think it’s a pretty cool sounding organization.

Tyler and I walked by the building on accident last weekend and I immediately wanted to help out in some way. It brought back memories of being in Spain and every Thursday going to the homeless shelter to hand out food with Pedro (who loved to talk my ear off). Pedro taught me the word barranco, which means cliff.:) So hopefully on Monday the director will be in and I can help them with cleaning, tutoring, playing with kids, interpreting, translating, or something else semi-helpful. I think that being able to help out there would be a great way to relax and get rid of some stress from teaching…not to say that teaching is stressful, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.:)

The Joy of Small Copan

This afternoon Tyler and I decided to pay a visit to Jorge’s Cousin Esmeralda and then try and find the house of Norma (sub-director) in order to get out and talk with some people. Last night I made some apple-cinnamon biscuits, I know it’s shocking, so we decided that dropping some off would be a good excuse and SUPER nice of us.

First off we go over to Esmeralda’s and have a nice, quick talk with her about church last night. Tyler and I didn’t go cause we went to a morning service instead. Apparently last night was a really good service and all the young people partnered up with adults and they prayed for each other and she was saying that she wished we were there to pray with her. Then I give her the biscuits, just two, nothing significant really, but since we are really nice people we wanted to share. In turn she invites us over for dinner tonight! Dangit! I was the nice one who was going out of my way to do something for her. She wants to make baleadas this evening and teach us how to make them. So we have a dinner date with her at 5:30-ish.

We leave there and head over to where we think Norma lives. I decide that she gets three biscuits cause I know her better. We find her house after asking around to people and she invites us in. I give her the biscuits and am just beaming from ear to ear with my generosity. She invites us to take a seat and offers us lemonade. So darn, there goes my great generosity, we are equal now. That’s alright, at least I still look pretty good from this deal, I gave her three biscuits she gives us two glasses of lemonade, that’s even. She starts telling us how she makes this crema stuff and cheese at their house. I ask if we can see it and tell her how we’re planning on buying some soon so we should buy from her. She takes us to where they make the cream and cheese and GIVES us a pound of cream and a pound of cheese. I tell her we can pay but she insists that the first one is free, then we can pay her next time. On the way out she also gives us a bunch of bananas! Oh my goodness, my great generosity is nothing!

I’m pretty sure that this is not terribly out of the normal around here to have people be super generous and willing to share. I’m excited to invite these people over to our place for dinner or lunch. Granted all we know how to make is spaghetti and French toast; but those are two high quality American meals.:) So all of this to say…I really like sticking around here in Copan for the extended weekends, instead of spending money on travel I save money by getting free stuff from people. Does that defeat the purpose of generosity? I don’t think so, I just enjoy it to it’s fullest.:)