Hace calor...
Trip Start
Jan 04, 2008
1
35
59
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
Cofradia,
Honduras
Friday, April 11, 2008
One of the San Jeronimo girls, Kaitlin, moved in with some of my wealthy neighbors and thus I have become friends with them too. The mom and dad are really friendly, there are two little kids and a 16 year-old daughter that is really cool, maybe I am partial because her name is Claudia. They also have a nice sized swimming pool with clean, chlorinated water! Kaitlin, Kyler, and I went to the movies with Claudia and her friend and the next day we all went swimming at her pool. Her English is great because she goes to a private bilingual school in San Pedro. I really enjoy making Honduran friends and it is also great to have some girl friends since I am surrounded by my "brothers" all the time!
On Sunday afternoon, Gerardo and I went on a give-away spree
Bald gringas!
. The wonderful nurses at St. Anthony's Hospital saved up bottles of baby Tylenol for me to distribute to some of the poor families here. The bottles would have otherwise been thrown away, yet another example of American waste. Anyway, we crossed the bridge over into the super poor section that I usually run in. I brought a bunch of toys and little cards also. The kids were ecstatic! I ended up giving away about 20 items at the first stop because kids just kept coming out of nowhere and each one wanted a toy, naturally. I cannot wait to get more goodies to pass out. Monday night I took the risk and went to a butcher shop for some beef. Normally, I cook a chicken but I wanted to branch out and attempt to make beef stew. First off, they don't refrigerate meat around here so the beef was "fresh" off the hook. It was a little crusty around the edges and very tough but in the end I diced it all up cooked it for hours and made a pretty decent stew. Chicken is much more widely used here. There are live chickens wandering everywhere and it is not uncommon to see a person on a bike or the bus holding a live chicken either under their arm or by its feet. Fresh!
This week I was a little stir crazy. I won't lie, I was in a bit of a rut. I am tired of being sweaty, hot, stinky, and dusty
Madheline
. The "feels like" temperature is around 105 degrees. Heat lowers my level of patience a smidge and the kids are on a behavior plateau. So I basically spent the week looking forward to my weekend on the beach! (See the next entry for more info!) Looking back on last week, it does not seem that bad. I am still teaching nutrition to the kinders. This week we made "caterpillars" out of Ritz crackers, peanut butter, raisins, and chow mein noodles for legs. We read "The Hungry Caterpillar" and ate our little caterpillars. On Fruit Friday I brought in a watermelon and we went out side and cut it up. They love fruit! Speaking of which, did you know that Cookie Monster no longer eats cookies? In all the new Sesame Street material he is depicted with salad, vegetables, and fruit! Although I love tradition, that is a healthy change. The fifth grade had their first English exam this week. Most of them did pretty well but some of them failed.
We had some guests in town for the week from Seattle. Two of them are professional photographers and they snapped a couple thousand pictures of our school and students. They plan to use the pictures to raise money for the school by selling prints and having an expo. The pictures will be posted online and available for purchase so I will post the links whenever I get them.
One day, this girl named Melanie showed up. She has a paid teaching position in Tegucigalpa but wants to quit her job there to come work in dusty, hot Cofradia... we are not arguing. We decided to throw a dinner party to show her what working here is really like, haha. It was a good excuse to get together and Chad cooked up some amazing black bean burgers.
