Laura Knight

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to how long you have to wait to get a cab in Honduras. I have left the house at 7am, found a queue of forty people and been in my class at 8.15, I have also left at 7.10 to a queue of four and not made it until 8.45.

This appears to be transport in Honduras, and I suppose, Honduras generally. At first I hated it. It was just one more thing I couldn’t predict, measure, understand or relate to.

However, I noticed this morning that I haven’t worn my watch for three days. I seem to be relinquishing my rather English obsession with timeliness. I think I’ve realized that the trick is just to kick back and go with it. It feels nice.

To say that this week was easier than the last would be to misrepresent it slightly. A few days in I developed this strange and rather prolific skin rash all over me. At first I thought it was nerves. Then I though it was my new moisturizer; some Mexican produced Nivea.

So I learned a new word this week; ´chasta´

It´s Honduran for crap product.

This afternoon I sat a gruelling Spanish evaluation. It confirmed, in the clearest and most secondary school of fashions, that I am in fact crap at Spanish.  It´s a relief. At least I know I have been living up to my full potential this past week.

• Taxi Directo (the ones you and I are used to) go from your door to where you want to be. You can flag them down or call them but you have to negotiate the fair before you get in. They are expensive.
• Taxi Collectivo. These operate in certain districts and cannot go beyond them. Lempira’s.
• Buses 3 Lempira´s. They are generally crowded affairs. Rife with robbers, very loud music and a ´character´ of a driver. Knowing which one to get is half the fun as they have the route painted on the front, which means it says the same whichever direction you are going in. You have to rely on the bus boys that ride on the side and shout the destination. Considering I can barely understand it when someone spells it out for me this is possibly the trickier option for me. 

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.’