So, finally I find myself sat here the night before I fly to Honduras for a year. Despite. giving everyone four months notice, I don’t seem to have seen or spoken to everyone I wanted to before leaving. It still it doesn’t feel like I am going. The list is checked, the bag is packed. Four months of planning, list making, fundraising and goodbyes.
Precisely one week of putting my clothes in and out of freezer bags. Yes, freezer bags. Everything is individually wrapped, squashed, air-tight; safe from the humidity it’s about to be introduced to. Consequently, even my underwear looks like a frozen microwave meal. Everything I am taking for a year now fits into a 70l rucksack.
Despite all the planning, despite the fact that for the first time in my life I seem to have
followed a plan through seamlessly to the end without a hitch, I can’t help but feel I have missed something. Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe these are the nerves everyone seems to think I should have?
Tonight I finished sticking photos into my album to take away with me. I was planning to take some Marmite, tea or HP sauce, if only to demonstrate that all the great British
things are brown. But I didn’t get round to buying any of it. So it seems that the families
of Honduras will not have the pleasure of Marmite. Nor I for that matter. At least I won’tbe resigned to eating it by the spoonful in moments of homesickness, as so to be sure that I am probably not missing a thing.
The weatherman is predicting 60mph gales for Lincolnshire tonight and for a moment I wonder if Hondurans talk about the weather quite so much as the English. I realize that I still can’t say ‘warm out isn’t it?’ in Spanish. No doubt they have not had the pleasure of the winter vomiting bug yet, a ‘pleasure’ I am pleased not to be exporting. Everyone here seems to be sickening for something. I wonder if Honduran men get ‘man-flu.’