I've been spending a lot of time hanging out with some of the younger kids in the neighborhood. Normally I get home from work, put on my mud caked pair of shoes (only for playing soccer) and grab my soccer ball. All I have to do is step outside and start kicking the ball around, and Tui (neighbor kid about 6 years old) will show up. He has a sixth sense and always seems to know when I have a soccer ball and will come running yelling "let's play, let's play." Soon other neighborhood kids show up, all about in the 6-11 age range. When we play an actual game, we use rocks for goals and play with two person teams because the road in narrow. We have a rotation system where the scoring team stays and the team rotates off. Often though, we will play some form of keep away or just pass the ball around a circle. I'm teaching them how to juggle the ball. Tui will sometimes keep the ball in the air past three kicks and then get so excited he forgets to keep going.
Another cool thing I've been up to, is teaching these kids how to through a Frisbee. About a week ago I went to the store and found a cheap Frisbee. I went and bought a cheap one because I had a hunch it might land on someone's roof on the first or second throw. So I brought it out one evening and showed a couple kids how to throw it, and we passed it around for a while. And then sure enough one of the kids decides he wants to throw it high and it goes straight onto the neighbor's roof. I figured that was the end of that, since I've noticed that things tend to stay up on the roofs. But then the other day a two of the kids were up on that roof, I think they were after coconuts in the nearby tree, and they retrieved the lost Frisbee. We have now played a couple of evenings without losing it to any more roofs, progress. Another interesting thing is that some of the girls that are usually too intimidated (or uninterested) to play soccer will come over and throw the Frisbee with us. I would love to teach these kids ultimate but that might be a bit too advanced, we'll see.
This evening I was tired and took a nap in the early evening. My host mom later told me that a couple of the kids came asking for me and she told them that I had left for the US already. She then told me that their eyes got big and they asked when I was coming back. So she told them that I was just visiting my family and would be back later that same evening. While my host mom was just joking around with the kids their reaction reminded me that I'm not the only one who will go through a transition when I depart.
This week I climbed way up in our mango tree to get one of the last mangoes on the tree, maybe it is time to start thinking about coming home.
Also in case you have muddy shoes in need of cleaning, playing soccer in the rain doesn't work quite as well as you might think it would.
Thanks for reading
June 23, 2012
June 4, 2012
Where did the kitchen go?
I've talked about my host family rearranging things around the house before. Here's a post from back in October in case you missed it. I spent last Sunday doing something similar.
This story starts with a needing to move a couch. The couch is in a room that has been used as storage since I've been living here, but is now going to be turned back into a pulperia (a corner store). But first the floor needs to be re-cemented. So this couch needs to find another place in the not-so-big house. Since the living room is quite small and full as it was, the logical thing to do is to move the living room to a bigger room. Continuing on this train of thought, the plan ended up being that the living room would move to the kitchen, the kitchen packed up and relocated to the parents bedroom, and the parents settling into what was the living room. Basically rearranging the whole house.
I woke up on the warm Sunday morning, to the sounds of hammers pounding outside my door. As an added bonus, the power was out all day which means no fans and also no running water. While eating breakfast I realized that all my host siblings conveniently had other stuff going on that took them away from the house. It was pretty fun to spend the morning with just the parents, joking around, and solving the puzzles of getting the front of the house moved to the back and vise versa. In this process I learned that they had switched the configuration of the house about a month prior to my arrival and we were now moving rooms back to their original locations. In that move they had moved doors around, switching one with a window and the other they bricked up. And this move means that those doors changes will have to be undone... Learning of this earlier change up cleared up some things for me, like why the light switch to the porch was located behind the fridge.
When we finished for the day, we had the 3 rooms rotated. We hadn't started punching out holes to move the doors yet, so for now the front door leads into the parent's bedroom. We must have tried 16 different configurations for the kitchen before deciding on the one we tried first. And I convinced my host sister, only for a second, that we had decided to move her room into the small storage room. A very Honduran style of approach to moving a couch, which looks like it still might not have a place to fit in the house.
Thanks for reading
This story starts with a needing to move a couch. The couch is in a room that has been used as storage since I've been living here, but is now going to be turned back into a pulperia (a corner store). But first the floor needs to be re-cemented. So this couch needs to find another place in the not-so-big house. Since the living room is quite small and full as it was, the logical thing to do is to move the living room to a bigger room. Continuing on this train of thought, the plan ended up being that the living room would move to the kitchen, the kitchen packed up and relocated to the parents bedroom, and the parents settling into what was the living room. Basically rearranging the whole house.
I woke up on the warm Sunday morning, to the sounds of hammers pounding outside my door. As an added bonus, the power was out all day which means no fans and also no running water. While eating breakfast I realized that all my host siblings conveniently had other stuff going on that took them away from the house. It was pretty fun to spend the morning with just the parents, joking around, and solving the puzzles of getting the front of the house moved to the back and vise versa. In this process I learned that they had switched the configuration of the house about a month prior to my arrival and we were now moving rooms back to their original locations. In that move they had moved doors around, switching one with a window and the other they bricked up. And this move means that those doors changes will have to be undone... Learning of this earlier change up cleared up some things for me, like why the light switch to the porch was located behind the fridge.
When we finished for the day, we had the 3 rooms rotated. We hadn't started punching out holes to move the doors yet, so for now the front door leads into the parent's bedroom. We must have tried 16 different configurations for the kitchen before deciding on the one we tried first. And I convinced my host sister, only for a second, that we had decided to move her room into the small storage room. A very Honduran style of approach to moving a couch, which looks like it still might not have a place to fit in the house.
Thanks for reading
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