Merry Christmas!

Blog

From: Jessica

December 18, 2007

Seven more days until Christmas and 13 until the New Year! Wow! So we have been here for about 5 months – I can’t decide how I feel about that! Sometimes I feel like we have been here FOREVER, but then other days I feel like the time is going by pretty quickly. I guess Christmas always sneaks up on me so right now I just can’t believe that Christmas is here and the year is almost over. A lot of people here have decorated their homes for Christmas. Quite a few people have lights around their windows or trimming their house…also I have seen quite a few Christmas trees with lights. The lights here are pretty expensive for our budget (about 200 lempiras - $10), so we have not bought any, but my mom and grandma sent us a few decorations. Our house is looking a little festive, which makes me feel good.  Some friends were supposed to come over for Christmas, but it looks like they won’t be coming over until about the 28th. We will just have to celebrate a few days late!

Brian and I have been keeping pretty busy with the same things – classes with Educatodos. We are actually moving along fairly quickly so it looks like we will finish by the middle of January. This will give the students (and us!) just over a month off before we need to start classes again. Our hope is that for this next school year we will be able to end sometime in November. This way we will be keeping the same schedule as the regular schools here. I am sure I mentioned it, but I will again, that right now the schools are on summer break. The new school year starts in February; this confuses me to no end because I am constantly thinking that it is summer break in the States, too. I think that starting next week, we will be teaching both 7th and 8th grade or one of us will teach 7th and the other 8th. The prometora, the women in charge of Educatodos here in Colomoncagua, should help us with the regular part of the classes, especially with the Spanish. Hopefully, she does.  Next year, I am not sure exactly what we will be doing, but we will probably teach 8th and 9th grade so that the students we have been working with can continue. Technically, Brian and I should only be helping out, at the most teaching English, but the program here is having its problems. They just cannot find someone to facilitate the classes.

We have been to El Salvador twice now. There is a bus from our town to El Salvador – we went to San Francisco Gotera both times. El Salvador uses dollars – which is pretty strange. We like it there because they have lots of fruit and vegetables, and they are much better quality there than in our site. Almost everything we bought was a dollar – so four apples for a dollar, a box of strawberries for a dollar, I bought a belt for a dollar! Some things seem to be a bit cheaper in El Salvador than here, but then other things are far more expensive. We wanted to buy a blender and the cheapest one we found in El Salvador was $45!! Here, we can get one for 400 lempiras which is about $20. And they are the really cheap blenders from like Target! El Salvador has almost all paved roads, which is quite a contrast from Honduras. And although you definitely know that you are still in Central America is has more of a developing country feel. I am happy that we got Honduras and not El Salvador for our service! 

A guy was supposed to come to our house to look at our broken pila and then hopefully fix it, but the three days he was supposed to show up, he didn’t. So, we still have a broken/leaky pila. It is really only a problem when we have a lot of laundry to do or when we need to flush the toilet and the water isn’t running! And this house gets so dirty! It has been quite windy and now that there is no rain it is super dusty so dust just comes in…our kitchen and dining room do not really close up, the windows just have screens, so they get particularly dirty. They do not really insulate the houses well here…there are just tons of cracks and spaces in the roof where dirt comes in – as well as from under the doors. Good house news…I have been practicing baking in the toaster oven. It has been turning out really well – I have made pizza, foccacia bread, peach cobbler, biscuits, and chocolate chip muffins. All of course, have been drastically modified using Honduran ingredients and to fit in the toaster oven. And it has taken some experimenting. Our toaster oven does not have temperature settings only top heaters, bottom heaters, or both. So I have to change the setting during cooking to get it just right.

More and more Brian and I are becoming ‘more popular’ if you will…hehe. Almost the second we step out of our house we get a “Brian, Jessica.” They like to just say our names! I get lots of little girls coming up to me to just talk or to touch my face or hair! “Es muy bonita” or “Es muy blanquita.” I am either pretty or white…haha!

Two books you should read if you are curious about Honduras: Don’t Be Afraid Gringo and Enrique’s Journey – both great books especially Enrique’s Journey. Jenna Bush’s book about AIDS in Latin America is supposed to be pretty good as well.

And I leave you with a little John Lennon…

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try
No hell below us, above us only sky
Imagine all the people, living for today
Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too
Imagine all the people, livin’ life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us and the world will be as one.

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can?
No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…
You may say that I am dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope someday you join us and the world will live as one.


CONGRATS to Julie and Josh – now married and Matt and Casey – now engaged! Yay!