Waiting is Doing

Well, its hard to keep the posts going (and even harder for you to read them, I'm sure!) but we are trying to not slack off. This post is going to be a simple one with photos from another recent trip we took. On Thursday, week before last, we were asked to go on a trip with the staff and some of the students from the Escuela Taller. Good thing we are flexible because they were leaving the following Monday!! The premise of the trip was to visit two other Escuela Talleres financed by the Spanish development program. One is in Antigua, Guatemala, the other in Gracias, Lempira (western Honduras). In between the two, we stopped in Copan to see the famous Mayan ruins there. We had a fabulous time and enjoyed rollin around on a chartered bus with 50 Hondurans for five fast and furious days. Of course, our luck, the camera memory card went on the fritz after all the pictures we took in Antigua, but we will be back to get more!!! It was beautiful, even if it there were more gringos there than I have seen in all of Honduras in the last 6 months!

The best part of the trip is how much better we got to know the kids and the staff at the school. Relationship building with Hondurans is half the battle to getting work done here. We also learned a very important lesson about Honduran culture....waiting is doing. This Javi-coined phrase very accurately describes the amount of waiting we did with these guys on the trip. Any time we were going to do anything, or go anywhere, there was a lot of waiting involved, small group or large. But waiting was not an inconvenience, like waiting in line at the post office or the like, it was more of an activity which involved lots of talking and joking as we waited. This is a good cultural lesson for us fast paced, ultra-convenient demanding American types.

So, the first two pictures are the ruins at Copan, the last 4 pictures in Gracias with the staff and students from the Escuela Taller.

I promise we will get better about posting about life here in Honduras. (Some might be interested----) I already have some topics in mind......step by step pila laundry washing, a whole segment on PIROPOS (cat calls), the market, WORK, etc..... Hang in there with us!

Santa Rosa de Copan

This weekend, Javi and I went to visit some Peace Corps friends (Sean and Kate) in beautiful Santa Rosa de Copan. Man these guys have a great spot. Its a charming city, nice weather and people actually SMILE at you around town. We've just recently learned that we here in Comayagua happen to live in one of the most notoriously UNfriendly cities in Honduras. The other two are supposed to be Tegucigalpa (capital city, no surprise) and another city called Danli close to the Nicaragua border. Go figure!
Anyway, below we've got some shots of our visit.

This first one is of Kate, Sean and Javi strolling down the sidewalk. I thought Comayagua had uneven, chaotic sidewalks but Santa Rosa has it like this all over town! One that we walked down had a 4 foot drop off where the sidewalk just ended. We had to turn around and walk back, with amused locals looking on.


Here is a view of the city as you walk down the street. The whole town is built on gentle rolling hills, with pine forest on mountain tops in the distance.

Javi and I tried some of Santa Rosa's famous Copan Dry. People there are REALLY proud of it.

Santa Rosa is home to the one and only Peace Corps house in Honduras, so we went to check it out. It reminded me of a dirty college house but it had a certain charm to it. Stacks of books, games, maps and random items left by volunteers over the years were all over the place. Unfortunately the new country director has decided to shut the house down. Area volunteers are pretty upset since they use the place to crash quite often. We personally won't be affected out here since we are not likely to ever use the house, but its sad to see a peace corps tradition end.

On Sunday morning we went with Kate and Sean to the market for their weekly fruit and veggie purchases.

People were quite friendly and were actually making sure you got the right amount for the money you were handing over instead of trying to squeeze a few extra lempiras out of you. I'm normally kind of scared to take pictures at our vegetable market here in Comayagua but Santa Rosa is small and safe so I decided to bring the camara out.

Here is Kate picking through tomatoes at the market. They made us a delicious homemade spaghetti later that night.

We had a great visit. And when we got here to Comayagua, even though it was back to the HOT weather and hustle and bustle, it was nice to be back.

Our new digs

Well, the time finally came….we’ve moved into our own place. And how sweet it is! Here are some photos of the new house: The front of the house is surrounded by a wall, which is nice for relaxing in the hammock without being stared at. There is only so much staring and piropos a person can take in a day.

And here is Javi relaxing in the hammock. That is a prime spot (especially after work) and it is our most prized piece of “furniture.”

As this next picture illustrates, we don’t have much by way of furniture. Actually, what you see here is all we have, plus our bed and stove. The guy in the photo is our site mate Connor.

Not having a lot of furniture is actually nice so far. It makes cleaning easy and nothing feels cluttered.

Here is the kitchen. We won’t have a fridge until next weekend, when the owner of our house can bring one for us. We’ve managed to cook without it so far, but it’s a lot of work since we must cook everything that is perishable right away and eat everything we make.

Man has it been nice to have a clean kitchen again, which is OURS. The last host family we stayed with here in Comayagua had the kitchen that was being “remodeled” and was in a serious state of disrepair. There was also a whole ecosystem of wildlife in there. Besides the cockroaches and geckos, there were mice (a perfect hole in my ramen noodles cup was evidence of that), bees (on one occasion Connor was actually stung by one) and there was even a huge sapo (toad) that would wander in at night from the indoor patio.

This last photo is of our pila area. (A pila, if you remember, is where you keep water if you do not have running water. We do have running water in Comayagua, so our pila is where we do laundry.) The various buckets in the background and the scrubbing surface on the left hand side of the pila is where all those clothes got clean today.

And so, our 7 month stint living in the homes of other people has finally come to an end. Since we left our apartment in Dallas last November, we have stayed with friends and family in New Mexico, Texas and Tennessee, and then on our Christmas trip to Europe in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. Then, since February, we have been guests in 3 different homes here in Honduras. There was the host family in Santa Lucia, Cantarranas and the last one here in Comayagua. It feels great to unpack our bags, listen to music again (on speakers at least), decide what food to make, walk from the bathroom to our closet without a towel and just feel relaxed in our own house!