Mowing the Lawn: First Evening in Hogar

Monday, 3 August

My lighter days of being a more or less passive volunteer are quickly nearing their end. Wednesday morning I’ll begin my Clases de Inglés with the “Adultos Nivel II,” notorious for being the worst class in Talleres: worst meaning, in their minds, discipline is a mutual concept; and also, worst being these kids cannot read or write in Spanish, much less hope to recognize today’s date in English that I’ll write on the whiteboard. Despite my Honduran mosquito-sized nerves, I have to say I’m excited to get going with my actual job here.

This morning I learned a lot about how things are done here and how difficult it is to try to change anything, no matter how much a new plan seems to be more practical or make sense. After 45 minutes listening to Jorge, my boss in Talleres, explain why it is impossible for me to have my own classroom—his “no es possible” drowning out my stammering in Spanglish—I decided it would be best to just close my mouth and observe for a week or two to see how the system works (or doesn’t work). Apparently moths before now they had begun building an addition to Talleres with a classroom specifically meant for the volunteer English teacher. The whole annex was supposed to be finished this past June, and for some reason which Jorge hasn’t figured out yet, the builders stopped coming one day. So a heap of half-poured concrete and a few sheets of lumber sit smattering the patches of dirt and grass behind the auto shop, waiting to be transformed into a brand new classroom for a bright-eyed, energetic, recent college-grad eager to jump in and save the world with her notable $5 vocabulary words and impressive handling of meticulous grammar concepts. Well maybe that’s not quite so accurate, but I do enjoy a good game of Scrabble.

After spending all day planning for my first classes, I took a quick run with another volunteer to the Represa this afternoon, a secluded river/monstrous pond that spills over a small dam before being sucked into the maze of old pipes that deliver the delightful cold showers that I try my best to avoid. Even if the Represa wasn’t surrounded by indescribably beautiful walls of lush trees and colorful tropical flowers, I’d still call it my favorite place here. The calm, wide water winds far back past where I could see, and the humid afternoon sun shining on the cool surface invited me to test my courage. I took the ultimate leap of faith: diving into a jungle lake of brown water where numerous small surface bubbles surely indicated the presence of unseen water creatures should have caused me to assess the odds of attracting some rare parasite, or at least being pulled underwater by a phantom current; yet I’ve learned that sometimes, you just have to jump. My lack of hesitation was instantly rewarded with deep warm water and a happy desire to float on my back and thank God for such a gift. In my contentment, peace and present position, I couldn’t help but feel like Mowgli in Disney’s rendition of The Jungle Book (without the scarlet loincloth). Once my compatriot informed me that no, there are no alligators in the Represa, my delight at such a treasure quadrupled. There’s nothing like a nice swim in the beginning of the winter season.

I returned from the Represa with half an hour until my first night with my new hogar, Hermanas de Jesús. My lazy strolling back to the volunteer house was met with the sound of machetes ripping through the grass and my path home was marbled with chopped bits of greenage. The 25 teenage girls in my hogar were hard at work on afternoon chores. Watching them bend over and take several strikes at the same tufts of stubborn grass, which more resembled a cheap mullet haircut than freshly shaven sod, I silently thanked God for modern appliances like lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Among cutting grass with semi-blunt machetes, the kids also have to hand-wash their uniforms every night for school the next day. Suddenly one washing machine for 16 volunteers doesn’t seem so bad.

To really understand what my first night in hogar was like, imagine this: you are coated with honey and chicken feed and thrown into a locked cage of loosed hungry hens, clucking and clucking at you when you don’t speak chicken and laying their eggs all over your stuff. Yet somehow, you find you really kind of like the chickens, and you certainly don’t mind the constant attention, at least at first. It’s only when they start grabbing and jiggling your love handles and invading all the kinds of personal space that many Americans obsessively cling to that you realize you will never get all those feathers off your body. But all the excitement and energy, the constant clucking even, is enough to make you forget about the fact that you will probably smell like chicken for months to come. Instead, I relaxed; I let myself make mistakes; and I laughed at myself. So did all of the girls when I mistakenly asked where my face went instead of my dinner plate, but those are the kind of moments that will bring us closer in the days and weeks to come.

The group is huge: 25 fresh teenage girls, ages 13 to 15, high on hormones and High School Musical, Daddy Yankee and Shakira. They greeted me with huge smiles and loud cheers that I was placed in their hogar. “We asked for you, we all wanted you, Daniela!” they yelled at me. The highlight of our first evening in hogar together was a poorly planned and even more poorly executed Zumba class. Thankfully the girls didn’t realize that their aerobic dancing teacher (me) is as white as they come when it comes to dancing and, what’s more, has been to a Zumba class only once in her life. Still, my rich I-tunes library delighted them, and I kept them changing moves and positions before they could realize that I had no idea what I was doing.

We ended the evening together with story time, the only kind that teenage girls want to hear: Daniela’s personal life. Huddled in a circle around me as I showed them pictures of my travels in Europe and my more embarrassing moments at home playing dress-up with my sister at the age of 20, the girls listened attentively and patiently waited for me to struggle through the vocabulary for ‘4-Square court’ and ‘long distance phone call.’ 8 pm is bedtime in Talita Kumi (the girls’ dorm); not 8:01 and certainly not 8:02, so the tia (the house mom) of my hogar was being very kind when she let us take a group picture before the girls went to bed. As soon as the timer snapped the picture and the flash went off, the whole clucking lot fled to the table to see what the picture looked like. Countless hugs and “buenas noches” later, I was ushered out the door, left to process the chaos of my first two hours in the coupe.

Even though I did not win the classroom fight today, I think I was pretty successful in other areas of Ranch life. I will let you know how Wednesday goes as well as night #2 in hogar, and I will post the picture of my girls in a few hours. Thank you for reading!