A New Year

So it´s been a while again… and this time it looks like I’ve written the better part of a book. There has been a lot of stuff that has happened since I wrote last. I tried to break the entry up into sections so that you could read the sections that interest you, or get a snack half way through or something. There is much more that happened then what I had time to put into words, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more.

Pictures from Vacation

Christmas

I spent Christmas with my host family in a town called San Jose, where both my host parents grew up. I am glad to have experienced Honduran Christmas but I can’t say that it will be difficult to go back to Christmas I grew up with. I don’t claim that my experiences are pan-Honduras Christmas traditions, but I have heard similar stories from others. Firstly Hondurans will say that they celebrate on the evening of the 24^th, I fell for that. They really mean midnight or 1 a.m. which then is really the 25^th.

The 24^th started early when my host family and I loaded the truck at five in the morning for a two hour drive to San Jose. The 24^th seemed to be a full day of cooking, thus the reason for leaving super early. Traditional Christmas foods my family made were: tamales, bread, and leg of lamb. I spent most of the day with my host brother, Christian, visiting relatives and of course every place you go gives you a little something to eat. I don’t think I actually ate a meal all day.  The “evening” of the 24^th celebration consisted of the kids setting off fire works in the street followed by a secret Santa gift exchange at midnight with my host Mom’s family. And since we’re on Honduras time, we didn’t get started before 12:30 a.m. So everyone was tired yet excited, plus everyone wanted to joke around making it impossible for anyone to give secret Santa instructions. When the exchange finally ended we had coffee and sweet bread before going home at two in the morning. It was a long day.

The 25^th was really relaxed with no plans and lots of leftover food. I took advantage of being in a really safe small town and went for a run in the mountains, something I miss being able to do. The traditions here feel different so much that I forgot it was Christmas a couple of times, each time asking myself, “How do you forget it’s Christmas?” It was interesting to participate in different traditions and to think that these traditions mean as much to people here as my traditions back home mean to me.

Roatan

I was lucky to have my girlfriend, Liz, able to come visit during my SALT term. She arrived the evening of the 1^st, and the following morning we left to go check out Roatan. Roatan is the biggest of the islands off the north coast of Honduras and is famous for its large coral reefs, white sandy beaches, and blue waters. We took a 2 hour ferry ride from the main land to the island. We arrived on the tail end of a storm so the ferry ride out was kind of rough, and the water was stirred up for the first day or so. The weather and water cleared up in time with gorgeous days at the end of our time on the island. Roatan has amazing diving and snorkeling. Unfortunately the cost of diving would stretch a MCC stipend a little too thin and because of the weather early on limited our chances of snorkeling. I went through culture shock a little upon arriving because we were still in Honduras, but the island culture is different and has a lot of American influence because of tourism. I found myself unsure of what language to speak because my instinct right now is to speak Spanish unless I know the person speaks English, and most people there will first engage in English unless they know I speak Spanish.

We had a great time and relaxing time on the island, I had wanted to go ever since our family came in ‘05. The town where we stayed, called the West End, has a main road that travels about a half mile along the beach with lots of diving companies, souvenir shops, and restaurants. We tried a few of the restaurants plus we found a place that sells fresh fish and were able to do some cooking. Shrimp curry happened a couple of times. More than once we found ourselves on the deck of a restaurant watching a Cruz ship slide silently by in the near distance.

One of the mornings we took some kayaks out to explore the bay.  We raced around, gliding over clear blue water and live coral that was sometimes as close as a foot or so from the surface. The waves that hit the bay would break at the entrance of the bay because of the coral, which made the water calm inside the bay. Liz found out that you could kayak surf and ride the waves that were breaking at the entrance of the bay. This was fun until a wave caught her kayak at the right angle to roll her out and carry the kayak away, leaving here stranded in a patch of shallow coral. Luckily I was able to retrieve the kayak and she could use her oar to push away from the coral to avoid bad injuries. But the scrapes she did get made the idea of being in salt water much less appealing.

Guatemala

When Liz booked a ticket to come down, we knew that I had a MCC retreat scheduled for one of the weeks she would be here. It was a weird situation, me going to Guatemala while she was in Honduras visiting me. But it was the only time a visit would work, so we made the most of it. Liz spent a week in Copan while I met up with MCCers from all of the Central American countries in Guatemala. It was cool to catch up with SALTers whom I haven’t seen since orientation as well as meet other longer term team members. The location of the retreat was on a lake call Atitlan, which is a gorgeous lake surrounded by towering volcanoes. It was interesting to make comparisons between Honduras and Guatemala. I at one point had the naïve notion that all of Central America was practically the same. I’m still amazed by how blatantly wrong I was.

After Guatemala

After returning to Honduras I had a week left with Liz to give her a tour of my SALT life. We went to visit the Stephens (MCC family just outside of San Pedro). We went to see a waterfall, sailing on the lake, and ate fresh coconut. Then went back to San Pedro to visit my host family and see where I live and work. My host mom (Consuelo) taught us how to make flour tortillas, which was hilarious. Consuelo can make perfectly round ones in half the time it took us to make shapes like footballs or Swiss cheese. Then for diner, Consuelo served Liz’s tortillas to me and my attempts to Liz. It was a fun night and I was able to translate which takes a lot of energy, but kind of fun.

Now the vacation is over and I’m back to work. I’m registering students for my next round of classes which start next week. It’s a little tough to switch back into work mode, I was getting used to vacation, travel, and visitors.

On a more somber note, my grandma (Erna Graber from South Dakota) passed away this month. I was not able to go home to attend the funeral. It was hard not to be able to go, but I’m really lucky to have support of the MCC team. It has helped a lot.

Thank you for reading