Laura Knight

I’m petrified that a few months back in London and I’ll forget all this. The UK is in recession. I’m pretty sure it will be tough going back. No time to reflect on it all.

I’ve also become convinced that the language I’ve learning is not so much Spanish as it is Honduran. So working on this hunch, I decided to make a vocabulary list of all the peculiar sayings I’ve encountered here. If only to have a record to test against when I finally make it to Spain again.

A

­­ A como está..? ¿How much..?

A mil: Really fast

A pata: Walking 

A todo mecate: Really fast

A vuelta de rueda: Really slow

Acabado: Without cash

Agarrado: Stingy..

Agüevado: Embarrassed

Ahi nos vidrios: See you soon

Andar a pincel: to walk somewhere

Andar aguja:  to go carefully

Andar buzo: to go looking for something

Andar con filo: to be hungry

Andar hule: to go without cash

Andar piano: to go carefully

Animala: a thing

Apuntarse: do the same as others

Arrastrado: a sycophant

Avanzar: to suprise someone

B

Babosada: nonsense

Bajar: to steal

Barajarla más despacio: explain in more detail

Barba: Barba amarilla – poisonous snake.

Bembón: Big lips (!)

Bolo: a drunk

Bolulo: White bread (La Ceiba)

Bote: prison

Búfalo: 50 cents (North Coast)

Burra: Working class lunch: 

tortilla with beans and egg.

C 

Caite: Sandal

Cachar: to trap

Cachimbear: to punch

Cachimbo: a large amount

Cachureco: National Party activist

Cagarse: be really shocked (like sh*t yourself)

Campechano: friendly

Canecho: Crab

Canilla: leg

Casabe: food made from Yuca.

Catracho: Hondureño

Catrín: Well dressed.

Chabacán: a joker.

Chacalín: Rever shrimp.

Chafarote: Police/soldier

Chainear: to clean

Chamba: a job

Chambear: to work

Chambón: a badly done job. 

Champa: type of house with leaf roof

Chance: an opportunity

Charamusca: frozen soft drink in a bag 

Chascada: free portion of food

Chepa: Police

Chepear: to cheat.

Cheto: pretty or provocative woman

Chibola: a ball or balloon

Chichí: a baby

Chigüín: a small child

Chimar: to rub

Chimba: homemade gun

Chimbo: gas canister for cooking

Chingar: to bother or bore

Chingo: shorts

Chiripón: good luck

Choco: something ugly

Chola: house

Choya: laziness

Chotear: to catch someone out

Chuña: barefoot

Chupar: to drink alcohol

Chutear: to kick

Cinquito: five cents

Cipote: a child

Coco: intelligent

Codo: stingy/tight

Coger: to f*ck

Con las antenas paradas: eavesdrop

Conchudo: expolited

Costra: grime

Cuchumbo: Homosexual

Cuero: a fit woman

Cumbo: water bucket

Cutear: to vomit

D

Daime: 20 cents

Dar el palo: to break up with someone

Dárselas de.. to show off

De cajón: obvious!

De seguro: surely

Deschambado: unemployed

Desmangado: very fast

Despupusado: very fast

Dos cuetazos: very fast

Dundo: dazed

E

Elote: corn on the cob

Encaramar: to climb

Encachimbado: angry

Enculado: in love

Ensuciar: to sh*t

Estar hasta los queques: to have no time

F

Ficha: something of little value

Filo: hunger

Finca: a farm

Fondearse: to sleep

Fregado: guy

Fregar: to wash up

Fresco: bottled fizzy drink

G

Gallo: ace!

Grueso: a large quantity

Guachimán: night watchman

Guarizama: Machete

Guaro: hard liquor

Guevón: a slob

Güicho: with few teeth

Guineo: a savoury banana (North Coast)

Güir: Contraction of “I will go”

Güirro: little kid

H

Hacer chanchullo: to cheat

Hacerse bolas: to confuse

Hacerse el loco: to presume ignorance

Hasta el copete: jaded

Hecho porra: tired/demotivated

Hijo de papi y mami: rich kid

Hule: broke (no money)

I

Ir hecho un cuete: very quickly

Irse a la chingada: go away

J

Jalón: a ride (hitchhiking)

Juma: a female drunk

Jura: army

L

La Compañía: on the North Coast, usually a reference to the Tela Railroad Co. (Chiquita) or Standard Fruit Co. (Dole).

La mera riata: the highest authority

La riata: inept

Llanta: rolls of fat round the midriff

Lempira: Honduran currency

Los Campos: Banana fields (North Coast)

M

Macaneo: scandal

Macanudo: a really cool person

Maje: silly

Mamo: prison

Mara: a gang

Marimbazo: a punch

Maritates: your belongings

Marranada: a useless thing

Mandadito: docile

Mate: a threat

Mayugado: something crushed

Meter la pata: to make an error

Mínimo: Banana 

Minuta: basically a slush puppy

N

Nacha or Natacha: a cleaner

Novelear: to be distracted or out of sorts

O

Obrar: to sh*t

P

Paila: back of a pick-up truck 

Pajas: jokes

Pajearse: to do nothing 

Pandear: to fold

Papada: a thing/a matter

Papo: an idiot

Pasada: an anecdote

Patón: a big foot

Pedo: a matter or a problem

Pelarse la tusa: to go

Perra: and exaggeration

Pico: a kiss

Pijinear: to go out to enjoy yourself

Pincelear: to walk (alot)

Pingüino: (lit. penguin) Cold.

Pintoso: well dressed

Pisto: money

Pistudo, o de pisto: wealthy

Ponerse coyote: to be alert

Porrazo: a punch

Potra: a game of football in the street

¡Pucha!: an interjection of suprise

Pulpería: the small shop

Q

¡Qué leche! !What luck!

Qué pinta! ¡How gorgeous!or ¡How cool!

Quedarse quedito: to stay quiet

R

Rapidito: fast buses in San Pedro Sula

Reventar cuetes: Playing with fireworks

S

Salado: that’s bad luck

Semejante: BIG

Semita: egg yolk bread (lovely!)

Sendo: BIG

Ser lechero: to have good luck

T

Tapado: A typical soup with meat, plantain, yucca and coconut milk.  

Tapas: mouth

Tegus: Tegucigalpa

Tener leche: to have good luck

Tener llantas: to be fat (lit. to have tyres)

Topoyiyo: frozen juice in a bag (North Coast)

Torcido: to have bad luck (lit. crooked)

Tostón: 50 cents

Tostones: fried plantain chips (North Coast)

Tránsito: traffic wardens

Treintero: Taxi – they used to cost 30 cents

Trepar: climb

Trincar: to snog!

Trucha: small grocery store

Tufo: a bad smell

Tunante: a womaniser

Tunco: to have one leg or walk badly

Turunca: a large stone

Tusas: Leaves that surround the ear of corn

Y

Yílet: razor blade

Yuca: dificult

Z

Zampar: to put/place

Honduras is almost definitely the land that punctuality forgot. No one ever really seems to be in a hurry to do anything. Or perhaps they never seem to be in a hurry to do what you want them to.

After being bullied onto the bus by a rather pushy gentleman insisting that it was leaving this minute the bus refused to pull out of the station for what proved to be almost an hour. Hondurans seem pretty fond of the words ´Ahorita´ loosely meaning this instant and ´ya´ meaning already.

¨What time is the bus leaving¨

¨Ya¨

It’s not really an answer, but it saves explaining that they are just waiting until there are enough people on the bus to justify leaving the bus station. It makes great business sense. If you’re at the end of a long journey and just want to get home its irritating and incredibly rude.

Published in the ICYE International Journal / Nov 2008

In January 2008 came to Honduras with ICYE.  I volunteer for Guaruma, an environmental organisation working in the Cangrejal valley about 20km from La Ceiba. As a project we work with rural communities along the edge of Pico Bonito National Park – the second largest protected area in Honduras spanning 107,300 hectares. Comprising of 20 river systems, dense unexplored jungles and cloud forests it is thought that Pico Bonito is home to species of animals rarely found in other parts of Honduras.  As an organisation we run a number of community education projects working with young people age 9-19. We run photography, environmental and computer classes and encourage the students to use their creativity to tell stories about their lives. The stories are there in abundance; annual flooding, deforestation and impoverished communities trying to forge an existence in this environmentally delicate area.

For all I knew about environmental issues like deforestation and sustainable farming, I can’t say I had begun to understand the complexities of them until I came to live here. Back home when we speak about environmental issues we do so as a matter of responsibility and rarely as a matter of survival. Here in Honduras the forests are disappearing at a rate of 3.6% each year. Honduras is an extremely poor country, consistently hindered by large amounts of debt and endemic corruption. Eighty percent of Honduran people live below the poverty line with nearly half surviving by working the land. A large percentage of land lies in the hands of foreign-owned fruit companies. It’s a sad pattern that land in the developing world rarely lies in the hands of the people who would most feel the benefit. Such dichotomies are prevalent throughout Latin America where economies are reliant on the price of their exports in foreign markets; markets over which the Latin Americans have little influence.

As I live and work in the small communities in this valley I become more closely acquainted with and implicated in such issues. At night I hear whispers of ‘burnings.’ Men leave at the break of day to hike steep trails and burn vast stretches of forest. On my evening walks I see deforested hillsides and fires blazing on the peaks. Two weeks ago I hiked up a trail to a bare stretch of hillside sporting a few sad tomato plants. I can guess that the tomatoes I will buy tomorrow in my village were farmed this way. These sharp mountain hillsides are a logistical nightmare to farm, but they represent the only choices for local people trying to feed their families. Soon the rains will come and the volume of water will be too much for the deforested hillsides. The Cangrejal river will swell to within an inch of our doors and the dirt tracks that connect our communities will become impassable mudslides. Our vital connection with the town will be lost.  Tonight I will prepare some extra food for my neighbour. Two years ago a mud slide buried his house and killed his wife. These are painful side effects of simple actions and they represent the lack of choice available to the people in these communities.

Environmental protection has been a theme in my life for as long as I can remember and the span of issues is vast and rapidly expanding. More recently the idea of environmental protection has taken on a new life as the global community gears up to meet the challenges of ‘climate change.’ Since coming to Honduras I have come to believe that for many us in the developed world, environmental protection is a question of choice. In Britain we benefit from a society and a standard of living that is ready to support us in meeting the environmental challenge. Yet with so much freedom and so many choices laid before us, we are still unable to make the smallest of concessions and changes in our lives. Instead we engage in debate, lose ourselves in denial and spiral into apathy about the very real challenges that face us.  In a society of so much comfort, it is very easy for us to feel the challenges of environmental protection intellectually. But it begs the question – how are we really engaging with the problems and understanding our part in them?

My time volunteering here has strengthened my conviction that for many in the world there are simply fewer choices. As a volunteer from the developed world  it is easy for me to come to here and ‘educate’ about the choices that need to be made to benefit the environment. But how easy is it for the people here to make and live with those choices?   Living and working in a community such as this I see the huge gaps between their expectations of the world and mine, between what they have to do to survive and what I have had to do. As a foreigner I am in a unique position to promote change. I provide contrast, present different ways of doing things and bring new ideas. In a way it’s all too easy. Where I often find myself stuck is how to effect change in the systems that allow these huge gaps to prevail.

Since coming here I find I often think about my own choices; my choice to come here and do what I am doing but also the choices I made in life before I lived here. More so I think about the choices I will make for a better future and I see that individual choices can only go so far. As people of developed nations we need to ask serious questions about our exploitation of less developed nations. We need to consider the price of our lifestyles and consider the part we are going to play in the environmental challenge. We also need to consider the huge demands that we are currently making of people who have so fewer choices to take.

In just 32 days I will be stepping on the plane to go home. A reality that is creeping up on me a little faster than I would have liked. In fact I am waiting for someone to explain to me precisely how we got to November so quickly. It just seems inconceivable. It’s a sobering realization to discover how quickly the time flies. Not only that but also how quickly you can switch from wanting it to get to the end as soon as possible and wishing it would just break its leg and have to crawl or something.

On the brighter side I am a Honduran TV star. Yes that´s right, I featured in an hour-long show about Guaruma on the TeleCeiba network. Now I know I said I wasn’t great at bigging myself up but my Spanish was excellent. It was truly an epic moment to watch myself on national TV babbling away about the project, our newly produced calendar, how young people are the future (amongst other very loaded statements) in Spanish.

I don’t know if you will get me when I say this but when you spend most of your day talking in a foreign language in your head it still sounds really slow and broken. Even though I have never liked the sound of my own voice it was wonderful to hear how confident I come across in this language I didn’t even know 11 months ago.

Unfortunately my hair was a disaster and I had serious panda eyes after a heavy night out on the town. But I suppose it wouldn’t any fun if it was all totally perfect would it?

Speaking of which I decided to spare you all an epic blog about my disastrous bout of food poisoning. As involved as you all are in my life over here this year I thought an account of my bowel movement might have been pushing the needles too far. All I will say is a) I am off chicken b) I am still scared of needles and c) we discovered I have endemic parasites, which is something few can boast.

It’s my last four weeks here….wow that sounds weird.

The rain is devastating. The locals have heard that it rains a lot in England and so they grin widely and say ´just like home huh?´ I force a smile and nod my head.  No, I think to myself, this is nothing like home. I have never seen rain like this. It just comes out of nowhere and it keeps on coming. It seems to come vertical too and with purpose. When you’re out in it feels like its forcing its way through your clothes. Our ponchos and Macs seem like token measures. Waiting at the bridge we see locals passing in the back of trucks crouched in black bin liners.

The children love it. Adopting that fantastic childlike attitude that time seems to beat out of us. They are cycling around in near see through clothes. You can only get so wet right?

Right now they are telling us it could rain all week, by which time I fear the river may have inundated everything. Elsewhere in Honduras the main hydroelectric damn is in danger of breaking if they don’t shut it down and begin evacuating the water. Of course in doing this they are risking flooding hundreds of homes in surrounding towns and villages but this is mere collateral damage when compared to what could happen if the damn breaks. Incredibly an EDAN evaluation claims that 42,234 people have been evacuated, 38,604 people relocated, 8,466 home have been flooded with 1,459 damaged, and 467 have been destroyed.

It’s easy to forget that this is a country still recovering from Hurricane Mitch in 1998. It’s very hard to believe but it is said that ten years later there are still 10,000 Hondurans homeless or living in temporary accommodation. I should probably say it’s hard for us to believe. I am sure if England was inundated the promised aid would come flooding in…no pun intended. Honduras is said to still be waiting for the financial aid it was promised to help implement preventive measures after Mitch. Nature has not been kind to Hondurans. Although it would appear the world has been even less so.

For now I am camped out in our project house awaiting news and listening to stories of devastation in rainy seasons past. Down in La Ceiba it’s more of a concrete jungle. The entrances and exits to the estate are already knee deep in water and the streets are like rivers. At least they are warm and dry and with power.

It’s easy for me to think of this as just another experience to add to my catalogue of new ones this year, for all that it is scary its also very exciting. However, I can always leave. The Hondurans live with this reality year in year out, one disaster to the next, one unfulfilled promise to the next, constantly putting out fires, never having a chance to fully recover. I wonder sometimes if this is why they are so relaxed about everything. At the mercy of nature I guess we are all powerless. But when you live in a country like this it must be easy to feel hopeless too.

Is yet to be confirmed but I think it will be very high. In fact, its already ten feet high and rising. What am I talking about? Well just over a week ago, we took the kids down to Las Mangas on an activity day and it was down there in Las Mangas where some sticky fingered cretin relieved me of a backpack containing my camera, the Guaruma laptop, some bed sheets about to be washed and perhaps the most horrific…my passport. A week down the line, one bollocking, countless guilt trips, an incidence on nervous vomiting, my first police testament in Spanish and about a million phone calls later and I am here still a passport (and lets not forget the all important visa) down. The moral of this story? If you think life is going too smoothly, it probably is.

I hope to God that you have never been misfortunate enough to have been relieved of your passport whilst in another country. For those of you that have, my heart goes out to you. For those of you that haven’t let me explain my experience so far of what they call ‘one of those nightmare situations.’

Embassies

I am not sure I really understand the concept of Embassies or consulates or High Commissions or whatever they are called. My idea of them was that they are who you contact if you get into a spot of bother while you’re abroad and they help you. I also had the strange notion that if your passport gets nicked and you find yourself living in a foreign country with basically no identity, visa or means of getting home the you could go and have a word with the nice man at the embassy and he’s probably make you a nice cup of tea with one hand and a nice new passport with the other. I was clearly deluded. Well maybe I wasn’t, maybe this happens in other countries, it’s just that I seem to be living one of the countries where the embassy/consulate/whatever can’t actually issue passports. Apparently the (once) Great Britain can’t do anything in Honduras without asking some nice man in Guatemala first. What’s more, said nice man doesn’t arrive in Guatemala for another few weeks. A slight comfort is that apparently the British embassy/consulate/photocopying service in Honduras can issue me with some sort of document that will guarantee me a safe passage from Honduras directly to the U.K should ‘issuing a passport prove a problem.’ That’s nice isn’t it?

Visas

I don’t know who thought of visas; whoever they were they must have been drunk. For all I can decipher they are arbitrary bits of paper that allow you a certain amount of days (lets call it 90) in a country before someone has the right to start charging you extortionate amounts of money, interrogating you in pokey little rooms at borders or inspecting your body cavities without your permission.
A visa can take many forms. It can be an actual printed document stuck into your passport, it can be a scruffy yellow note stapled into your passport or it can be some indecipherable stamp smudged into your passport by some insufferable and humorless border guard. The recurring theme I am sure you have spotted here is that they are nearly always inside your actual passport.

Passports

When you’re spending a long amount of time in any country, let’s say for example volunteering in Honduras for a year you need a visa. It’s essential. When the country refuses (as they usually do with no reason and no warning) to grant you a years residency then obtaining a visa becomes a ridiculous charade of border crossings or waiting in endless unmarked queues in immigrations offices and hoping that the monkey with the stamp behind the triple reinforced glass wall (seriously…why?) is not having a bad day. Sometimes you can turn your border crossing into an adventure (see holiday blog); most times it is a bit of a chore (see exactly the same holiday blog).
I had a visa, in fact I have had an up to date visa since I arrived here in January, they were stamped in my passport and everything. Unfortunately now my passport is gone I have absolutely no way of proving that I had my visa renewed every three months. In fact I have no way of proving that I didn’t in fact fly into Honduras and immediately disappear into a puff of smoke for a year. At best someone will take pity on me and issue me with some sort of stamp in exchange for some sort of ‘administration cost.’ At worst I arrive at the airport in December to fly home and get charged for being 251 days over my entry visa, this is of course if I can find my flight ticket from January. If not I could be the first British woman arrested for magically entering Honduras disappearing into a puff of smoke for a year. Anything is possible in the age of Anti-Terror laws.

‘A replacement passport could take anywhere up to four weeks’ the British Home Office Identity and Passport Service website cheerfully informs me. This wasn’t even slightly annoying until I found out that my German friend got a replacement passport issued within three days when she got robbed in Bolivia. Damn German efficiency, maybe I should look up the address of the German embassy and try applying for asylum from general incompetence, at least I would get my documents in time for the New Year.

The very same website also informs me is that to obtain a replacement passport I may have to part with no less than £97. Can I just enforce here that I was robbed, I didn’t give it to a passer by whilst drunk? Now I don’t now about you but for all that you can’t live without them I think they’re overpricing them a bit. What’s worse is that everyone I meet mocks my passport. Not for the picture inside but for how over the top it is. For the start it’s the thickness of a small novel, seemingly just to rub it in for those of us who normally don’t have the cash to leave Europe how few stamps we have. Secondly they’re burgundy, a colour I always associate with unwanted Christmas cardigans, faded colonialism and old men who smell of mothballs. Thirdly the typography is hideous and finally, what is that horrible huge gold leaf crest on the front all about? No other passport I have seen (and I have seen a few this year) has anything quite that huge or garish on its cover. You might as well just write ‘Hello I am from the once-Great Britain, you may have heard of us, we once had an empire. We’re dead old fashioned you know, we’ve got a queen and everything’ on the front of it and have done with it. £97 for what is essentially a small, ugly stamp collectors scrap book with some horrifically illegible Victorian script font in it?! Have you ever seen a Swiss passport? (see above) Now they’re cool. I might add Switzerland to the list of embassies to call in at when I am still living in Honduras in March because the gold crest franking machine in London broke down and they couldn’t print me a horrible passport. Maybe I could seek Design asylum or something. Just a thought.

Very little to report here. Up in the valley, life is as good. Its grapefruit season and I am gorging. I am averaging at least a bag of 6 large pink grapefruits every week…and that’s me restraining myself.

Against all odds, my 50 USD a month is stretching. It’s truly amazing what you can buy with so little cash, I am living like a Queen. The sort of queen who only eats fruit, vegetables and rice.

Mario had taken Maria down to La Ceiba on his motorbike on Thursday. The doctor told him to go to work. To miss a days pay would be unthinkable right now. He went to work that morning smiling and excited. Maria gave birth to a baby boy later that morning and all seemed well but as her blood pressure dropped and her face got greyer it started to become clear that she was sick. She told Sylvia, a friend and midwife, that she felt like she was going to die and she was worried for her children. Three times that day she saturated the bed sheets with blood and not one of the three doctors who came to see her would make the call. She needed an operation, but she was poor. She needed blood, but she was O-. It doesn’t do at this point to criticize the largely insufficient health system they have here in Honduras but everything they did came far too late. By the time the head doctor arrived to make the call to take her into surgery Maria had lost too much blood for the operation to be a success. She had torn her uterus during the birth and they had not stitched her up well enough. She bled to death. Mario arrived a little later from work, reportedly smiling and excited about his first child in 9 years. It was Sylvia who had to tell him that his much loved wife and mother of his children was dead.

We made our way down the somber street to their house and arrived just as Karina had been told. We passed an excruciating hour holding a crying Karina and listening to Mario, whose shock was stopping him from forming coherent sentences. As is the custom she would be buried within 24 hours. Within an hour the village school bus started on its decent down the hill, taking what felt like everyone in the village to pay their respects. We hitchhiked straight down to the Catholic Cathedral the next day. It looked disproportionately grandiose next to Maria’s plain wooden coffin and the congregation of poor villagers in jeans and t shirts.

Maria’s family had driven through the night from El Salvador to get here and were gazing disbelieving at the wooden box that contained their daughter, sister, cousin. A woman they hadn’t seen in years for the miles and borders that separated them.

The service was short and perfunctory and provided absolutely no comfort to anybody. They carried her out and into the back of an SUV and we all piled into the back of pick up trucks, standing all the way to the cemetery.  We all crowded round the unsightly hole in the ground, standing on the freshly dug graves of others. When they opened up the coffin and her family fell over her, crying and screaming. It was the worst thing I have ever witnessed.

Every culture deals with death in a different way. But this was awful. Seeing Maria, grey bloated and dead was terrible. This was not how I would remember her I told myself. I tired hard to hide my disapproval as people took photos of her with their mobile phones, wondering if this was more a result of shock than some strange unfamiliar custom. We held each other tight and watched until the last the earth was plied on by sweating relatives with shovels. Then we watched as Mario went to find two wooden slats, a hammer and a nail. There in the dirt he made an ugly wooden headstone for his wife, our friend, Maria.

I awake refreshed, gazing at the delicate spider webs clinging to the corrugated tin roof just inches from my nose for a long time before my brain made movement possible. I inched up and swung my legs over the side of the world highest bunk bed, taking in a deep breath and composing myself for the clumsy descent. I placed my foot on one of the horizontal wooden beams of our wooden hut and steadied myself with my hand before lowering my left foot down to the chair below. My toes searched amongst the books and headlamps for a safe place to stand and silently I prayed that the chair would not play it’s usual trick and wobble beneath me. The drop down always feels a little too far to be safe, my arm fully stretched as I finally touch down on the shiny concrete floor. Firmly on the ground I check the lower bed for Elly. However , today I found myself alone in the hut.

 Before me is our cardboard wall where I find my wooden carved Guaruma leaf with three new holes. The silent army of termites surround us. Omnipresent, they work undiscovered, committing drive by munchings of our belongings. A wooden puzzle of America, the majority of its states nibbled into dust. The beams that support the walls of our wooden home ridden with the tell tale holes. The appetite of these mini-beasts is incessant. At this moment it’s more on an amusement to think of eviction by nature. An army of termites like a vengeful landlord taking your skipped rent one brick at a time.

Outside I can already hear the taps running; the days activities have begun in spite of me. I have slept through the lighting of the fuego and the making of the days first tortillas. I have missed the neighbour collecting his bike from our porch and his descent to the city to work. I was not awake when the children unhooked their crisp white school shirts from the line, hanging next to the flat grey stone where their mother scrubbed them yesterday afternoon. I was still dreaming when the noisy yellow school bus arrived, pouring hoards of children – an army in navy and white into the doors of the local school.  The checked shirt workmen have already passed through, with machetes clipped to their belts and axes slung over their shoulders. They are already far up the trails that snake the steep hillsides on their way to the farms. The only sound they have left me is the pouring of water from the pipe just beyond our hut. When the bucket is full my neighbor will step down into the ditch that divides our houses and begin her daily task of scrubbing the family’s clothes on the rock, chatting with other neighbors while she goes. It will take her the best part of the morning to scrub the whole load clean, pinning it on the line above her head as she goes. Each sodden garment slapped on the rock the ritual four times. For now, neither the scrubbing nor the song of idle chatter has started. It must be about seven o clock; my watch replaced by the predictable local routine.

I settle into the hammock to contemplate my day. I know I have about three hours grace before my teaching day begins. Three hours before our porch is swamped with children asking for footballs, for cameras, or children selling small stone-bruised mangoes in bags, recently knocked down from local tress. Three hours, I think before I will break my silence to speak Spanish for the rest of the day to noisy, excited and eager students. I muse over the more attractive prospects; going for a swim in the river, going for a walk up the mountain trail, swinging here and reading a book. Then some of the less attractive ones; hitch hiking to the next village to wash my clothes or all the way to the city to pick up a letter. ‘It’s early’ I think ‘no rush’ and I push off the fence sending me rocking gently from side to side in the hammock, listening to the sounds of chattering birds and the ever present noise of the river.

 I think that it has been a restful awakening today as I catch sight of the plastic tub of small rocks on the porch. Half a coke bottle of small sharp rocks, just the right size. A tell tale sign of my daily activity; chasing away the neighbours pig from the dirt ditch that encircles our house. Reminded by this thought I glance quickly across to the clumsy fences of the vegetable garden, my eyes scanning for the signs of destruction and future arguments with the neighbours. Tie up your pig. Nothing. Perhaps we will survive the day without having to listen to some hopeless explanation of ‘personal space’ to our indifferent neighbour, who is thinking only of the pork chops he will enjoy when Christmas comes.

With a gentle push the top half of the kitchen door swings open. I reach round and move the clumsily nailed piece of dowel downward, giving me access to the kitchen. There are no corpses in the traps, a good sign. Or perhaps a bad one? I check the vegetables for nibble marks. I put a pan of water on to boil and unpack the coffee from the plastic boxes checking for signs of our second enemy invaders, the ants. I fix myself a feast of granola and powdered milk, remembering to mix it with the purified water this time. I drain my coffee through the ‘sock’ a crude fabric cone on what looks like a coat hanger, the preferred method of coffee preparation round this way. All around me is the smell of coffee, and for a fleeting moment I am standing in Bond Street tube station, in a rush, as always trying to muster some enthusiasm for another endless day at work in central London. At that moment a gecko loses its grip on the ceiling and meets the concrete floor with a loud slap. It quickly scurries away under the wall to recover from its embarrassment. Suddenly I am back in my wooden hut in the mountains of rural Honduras. Just another volunteer getting ready for the surprises and joys the day might bring.

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.