Month: July 2008

I had been promising Karina for some time that I would go to her house to watch a movie. I had lost count of the amount of times she had asked me in the last two months and the increasing amount of times she had given me her ‘I am very disappointed in you face’ when I had failed to set a date. For an eleven year old she had the guilt trip down to pat. One day she was going to make a great mother.

Karina comes from one of those very special families in the valley. One of the two we spend the most time with as a family of volunteers. Whenever there is a special occasion it is always Karina’s parents – Maria and Mario that we invite round.

Mario is a short man with an almost permanent smile on his face. He has two habits that make him dear to me; the first is that he can never remember my name and the second is that he is always asking me ridiculous questions. Every day he travels down to Ceiba to do whatever work is available. He has to work hard to support his family. Three of his own children and Christian, the two year old son of Maria’s sister. ‘A gift’ from El Salvador. When he arrives home in the evening he immediately takes his shirt off and begins helping in the kitchen. It’s the busiest part of their three room home and continually full of laughter. 

He is one of the few husbands I have met here who is openly affectionate with his wife. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not really done here. You almost never see couples holding hands in the street or kissing in public and so those rare moments of tenderness between spouses are really something special to behold. There are lots of these between Maria and Mario.

Maria is a short woman with laughing eyes and yet another permanent smile.  She is very much the boss of the house and always has everyone arranged with a few words. She’s an extremely proactive and giving woman. She has the village’s only sewing machine, where you can often find her patching pants and mending t-shirts for whoever might need it. Maria is one of those women for whom nothing ever seems to be too much trouble. You can ask her almost anything and you will be met with a big pair of dark brown eyes, a wide smile and a nod. “Vaya pues” is her catchphrase. She is currently obscenely pregnant. We seem to have been waiting forever for the baby to arrive. Every time we see each other we pat the bump and both say “todavía?”

Historically, I have a rather unfortunate habit of turning up at her house just as she is about to shower. I don’t know how I do it. This never stops her from giving me a big hug and a smile. The huge belly making the embrace somewhat awkward. Withouth fail she says “Me voy a bañar Laura.” We always giggle at the fact that this happens every time I call. Three of us squeeze to a tiny room, about as wide as Maria is pregnant. This little hut is where they have their fuego – a clay wood burning stove. It was Maria who gave me my first tortilla lesson on this fuego when we made about sixty for a party. Honduran women can make tortillas with their eyes closed. We chuckle at what horrible shapes I managed to make before finally getting it right. Karina and I quickly pat them out on our little plastic bag circles before passing them to Maria, who gives them a score out of ten before carefully placing them on the fuego to cook. It’s not long before Maria is presenting me with my own tortillas and a plate of chicken soup and rice. She smiles widely and we all sit on whatever we find in the living room and eat. I feel so welcome that its ages before I leave. When I do, Maria sends Karina to guide me up to the street, through the unlit mud track behind their house and tells me to come again soon.

El Pital

Dinner with the locals in Honduras is always a wonderful experience, albeit a humbling one. Tonio is my current landlord and next door neighbor. Despite his short comings as a builder (being three months overdue on my house and all that) he’s been nothing short of lovely to me. I forgive him for all that (and for waking me up at 5.30 every morning) because he brings me limes, tomatoes and mangos from his finca. He also makes his daughter give me tortilla lessons and sends his dog to sleep on my porch at night (to protect me apparently). Some nights we sit outside chatting and drinking pop and he asks me questions like “do the people in England know how to cook rice?” Then he makes us fried chicken, tortillas and refried beans before going to work at the local school where he spends every night sleeping on the floor as a night watchman. After dinner we all went to sit outside in a bizarre collection of chairs and hammocks chatting and trying to cure Tonio’s grandson of his fear of the hand sized moths flying all around us. The house is simple, three rooms with dirt floors; a kitchen, a bedroom – shared by the other six members of his family and a spare bedroom where the family host visiting volunteers. It’s amazing to look at what little they have and how much of it they are willing to share. The kindness of Hondurans never ceases to amaze me.

El Pital

I have been here a few months now. I find I get more and more used to how things are here and get less and less struck by how different it is to home. This probably means that I often forget to mention some of the things that happen that you might find very different. I have been thinking for some time that it might be a good idea to start writing about these things, so here we have it, a little guide on some of the differences between home and life here in the valley. I should probably set the disclaimer here that this is no way representative of Hondurans parse, but rather the Hondurans that live here in the same valley as me, who we shall refer to hereon out as ‘Cuencans.’

Reading

Apart from their school notebooks, which they are obliged to carry, you will almost never see a Cuencan reading. They would never have a book in their hand unless they were about to wedge something open or hit their dog with it (see ‘Perros’). Cuencans don’t genrallt tend to read for pleasure. They laugh a lot at us Gringos, who choose to pass the time swinging in a hammock reading a book. When it comes to reading, they have a list of other things they would much rather be doing. In fact I think they would rather be bored than read. The funny knock on effect of this is that most of my students have absolutely no concept of punctuation or spelling. If I ask them to write a story it will almost never have a comma or a full stop in it, it will just be a page long sentence. They often don’t even put spaces between the words, sosometimesitsjustapagelongword.

V’s and B’s

Over here, as in the majority of the Spanish speaking world, there is little differentiation between how you pronounce a B and a V. Consequently you end up with Bs where you need V’s and vice Versa; sometimes with hilarious results. For example on the way down a valley there is a sign originally designed to ask people to not throw rubbish out of their cars. It should read ‘No Botar Basura,’ botar being the very ‘to throw.’ What it actually reads, in lovely hand painted type, is ‘No Votar Basura’ which means don’t vote rubbish. Good advice, I guess, but I am not sure this particular sign was intended to be a political statement.

Meat

Meat is meat here, whatever it is and however it died. And they cook the lot. This is perfectly illustrated by the fact that when Jonathan’s dog caught a possum in the yard last week Doña Maria, the Honduran lady who lives with them had it bubbling in a pot before you could say “Christ that’s ugly.” Except they wouldn’t say Christ. They’re missionaries. Apparently Jonathan lifted up the lid to see what was cooking and found a little furry face staring back at him. Nice.

Frescos

I guess it’s different for different people, but in England I almost never buy Pepsi or Coca Cola. There about a million other things I would prefer to drink over this penny cleaning, gut stripping, unethical black goo. In England, I would also have so many other more healthy, cheaper and attractive options; the purified water that comes straight out my tap being one. Here of course they don’t have purified water coming out of their taps, some of them don’t even have taps. What they do have however is either Pepsi or Coca Cola. Every village will inevitably have a pulperia, which is the equivalent of a local store tacked onto the side of someone’s house. The only thing in addition to the most basic items that you are guaranteed to find at every pulperia in Honduras is Pepsi or Coke. This is because every pulperia in the country has a deal with either Pepsi or Coca Cola. Most days, round about dinner time you will see a child walk past on the way back from the pulperia with a bag of flour (for the evenings tortillas) and a 3 litre bottle of Pepsi (for the evenings refreshments). I can guarantee that the 3litre bottle of Pepsi cost more than the ingredients for their entire meal. Am I the only one that thinks that it’s totally hideous that a gross sugary branded drink is more readily available than clean safe water? To me it seems like development skipped a couple of chapters. Every day I am reminded that when I go home, I am going to slap the first person that complains about water ‘out of the tap.’ Probably with a 3 litre bottle of Coke.

Getting around

Transport is definitely different here. It’s funny how much time you can spend cursing the driver of an empty truck, who left you standing in the rain before you remember that they’re not actually obliged to pick you up. Despite the downsides and the illegality of the whole arrangement it goes on because it appears to keep the whole of this part of the north Coast of Honduras going. The biggest difference I had to overcome moving here was that the whole system requires you to adopt a much more relaxed stance to your plans. I have never been so absolutely dependent on others to get anywhere. The trick when planning anything is not just to leave two or three hours to get there, it’s also to plan that you might not arrive at all.

Pets

Dogs are not pets, I repeat dogs are not pets. Meaning that you’re not obliged to feed them, clean them or indeed be nice to them. They are simply there to bark at passers by in the night, by day they can take care of themselves. While I can’t deny that some Cuencans have emotional attachments to their dogs they certainly don’t dote on them in the same sycophantic way we do in Europe. Lot’s of people have Dogs here, in fact too many if you ask me, but to Cuencans dogs are always animals. One of the other volunteers, Simon, has a Labrador called Zoe and for the life of them no one can understand why we play with her, walk her, why she has a collar or why she does what she is told. The most incredible thing for them is why she is allowed in the house. It’s simply beyond the scope of the remit they believe a dog fulfills. To visitors it can seem completely cold, but then it’s also completely sensible. For them a dog guards the property, no more no less. The villages are full of skinny, tick ridden dogs, not a recognizable breed amongst them, who spend their days hunting around in bins for food and their nights barking at anyone walking through the village. Under no circumstances would you want to touch a Cuencan dog. They’re not dangerous, they’re just gross. They’re forever having babies, most of which get drowned. Few of them know how to play as their usual experience of being physical with a human being involves being beaten. The really terrible but quite funny thing is the trick that we all learn pretty quick. If you want to get rid of a Cuencan dog, say it’s barking at you or chasing you as they sometimes do, all you have to do is look at it then scoop down as if you were picking up a rock. They immediately scarper. They automatically assume you’re going to throw a rock at them. I am assured that this works in every country in Latin America. Practical…but really bloody sad if you think about it.

Honesty

A lot of cynical gringos who have been here far too long will tell you that Cuencans are dishonest. This simply is not true. In fact, as a culture they are often too frighteningly honest. This is best emphasized through their use of vocabulary, which can be hillariously binary. If it’s not beautiful, it’s ugly, if it’s not skinny, it’s fat. But more than that, everything is situational and it’s almost always comparative. If you are unlucky enough to be the largest person in the room, you are the fatty. To coin an English idiom, the Hondurans tend to call a spade a spade, but only if it’s stood next to a rake.