Feliz Año Nuevo

When I look back at 2010, I determine it a year of consistency. I realize that it started and ended the same way: with death. January 12th, the earthquake in Haiti, and the loss of Molly Hightower, college acquaintance and NPH volunteer. December 31st, Honduras, the loss of Rosa Lilian, one of the very best of Rancho Santa Fe. Tragic, but consistent. My tone here might convey anger, or resentment, or disenchantment, but that is not at all the tone of the last twelve months that I’ve lived. Instead, they’ve been filled with life and energy, even if incredibly tiring at times. I have to say this to convince you that it was a good year, a great year, despite the losses. I’m going to describe a few of the recent ones that have been on my mind and in the prayers of all of the Ranch community lately.

Rosa’s death on the last day of the year completed four deaths in four weeks for our Ranch home. We said goodbye to Glenda, Chrisly, and Juan José, all three of which lived beautiful lives full of love despite their health conditions. In Chrisly’s case, it was a very tired heart; with Glenda, it was a very tired body; with Juan, it was tired kidneys. But Rosa wasn’t tired, and that is the tragedy. She was full of energy. The news of her death came as a complete shock to us all. We were just about to assemble for the special New Year’s dinner when instead we were all called to the church where they broke the news. News can never be repaired, only broken. She had been on the roof of an NPH house in the city collecting some of her things to come to the Ranch and suddenly felt faint. Her friend tried to reach out and catch her, but it was too late, and Rosa fell. She fell down the stairs. There was nothing anyone could do.

I will never forget the wailing of her older sister, Eda. Sobbing and wailing, she lost her best friend and little sister. Rosa, just sixteen years old, leaves behind four other younger siblings besides Eda. I best remember her as my 9th grade student, squeezed in between her two best friends in the front row, tossing me confused but always respectful glances whenever I introduced a new grammar topic. She received top grades in my class even if the language did not come naturally to her. I always knew which assignment or test was hers by the eponymous flowery handwriting that matched her nature, as warm and smiling as script can be.

I cannot begin to imagine the suffering that her brothers and sisters and closest friends are feeling. Just the pain I harbor having known her the little I did is enough to make me question God’s plans. Especially as we’ve buried three others so recently. Maybe this is one reason why these things happen, though: to make us question. This brings us closer to God, right?

Today I set off for my usual afternoon run heavy with the thoughts of Rosa and the past four weeks. I was expecting a rough time of it, as I was already breathing pretty hard when the bottom of the hill came into view. Up ahead of me I saw the outline of a young boy walking slowly and swinging a sling-shot, or something like that, by his side. For a moment I thought that it would be a child from the Ranch, like me, upset about Rosa’s unexpected death and seeking some time away and alone from the least private place on Earth. As I neared him from behind, he turned quickly, his tall wide eyebrows heightened with surprise. I didn't know him. I apologized mid-stride for having scared him. He flashed a quick toothy grin, then surprised me when he too began to jog, still swinging his contraption as he ran with me. I looked over at him, nodded approvingly, and kept running, knowing that if I stopped I would never make it up the hill. He was running faster than I was, and even though he was a young boy and could probably run a marathon without breaking a sweat, I couldn’t let some kid show me up. So I picked up my pace.

My hill is steep and full of crevices and rocks, and you can easily lose your footing if you’re not paying attention and faceplant right into the baking Honduran dirt. Knowing this, and having been close to this faceplant in the past, I couldn’t help but marvel at the spry gazelle next to me prancing up the mountainside without so much as a huff. Each time my foot successfully negotiated another rocky crevice, it was a stone of emotional pain that I felt breaking off of me. It was the shock and tragedy of Rosa’s death, the loss of three others in the past month, the hundreds and hundreds of Christmas photos that I’d been sorting through all day, and the worries of having to say goodbye again in six weeks that were all sliding off of me with each stream of sweat that dripped down my cheek. I pushed through the pain.

We were at the steepest section and I was breathing hard. My little companion didn’t say a word, and neither did I; we both understood that words were unnecessary and impossible at this, the hardest point of the hill. I pumped my arms faster to keep up with him until finally we cleared the summit. I expected him to wave goodbye and start walking, but he kept with me. Now on the downside, I caught my breath enough to acknowledge our shared accomplishment. “You’re good,” I say. He nods. “I’m used to it,” he says. “I play soccer.” Of course. Soccer. He plays soccer. And I run every day huffing my way to the top, imagining months of damage of rice and beans sliding off my love handles like grease. If only it were so easy.

“How many sisters do you have?” I ask him, still breathing and pumping hard. “Oooh, lots! And one niece, too.” He grins and rattles off four or five good Catholic names, names that I already associate with at least three girls a piece from the Ranch. His name, though, is a secular Roberto. Looking ahead, I realize that we have already reached the first gate where I usually stop, stretch, and turn around if I know I only have a short amount of time in the afternoon. I look at my watch and see that it’s been the fastest first leg that I’ve run in months. I’d hardly noticed the time as we were puffing up the hill. Slowing to a stop, I tell my running buddy that I’m going to stretch my muscles and turn around, and he stops, too, watching me curiously while I bend over and wince. “It’s so that I can run again tomorrow,” I explain, and he laughs and waits patiently while I brave the waves of pain running back through my calf as I try to reach my toes. Straightening up, I see that he is still smiling, the same carefree smirk he’d worn all the way up the hill. “I’d run with you any day,” I say, starting the goodbye to this 17 minute, 11 second friendship. “Tell your family hello for me.” His eyebrows rise up so high they might float off his forehead, but he grins and nods, then turns quickly on his heel and takes off running, still swinging that sling-shot by his side. It takes me a minute to notice that he isn’t wearing shoes.

I finish stretching and start my stopwatch again, convinced to take it easy since I’d just lapped my past running self. The sun was lowering and it was my favorite evening time, when the sun’s position casts a gold hew on all of the green crops through the pine trees. I soon noticed that I felt light . . . and happy. It was as if all of the hurt, disbelief and doubt—in a word, Rosa—that I’d started my run with had dissipated, taken over by the memory of Roberto’s grin that I replayed in my head. The sweat still poured down from my temples, hot and lingering like fresh tears. But the tears I’d shed already for Rosa became suffused into some familiar but odd hope that ran with me now. Suddenly I realized that it wasn’t the losses that we are meant to hold onto and live with—though I wouldn’t mind living with the loss of those extra pounds—instead, it is the gifts we’re left with that we are meant to remember and take with us. Rosa was a girl who lived without resentment; without bitterness; even though her father had been killed and her mother died of cancer just two years ago, she rejoiced in each day: in guiding her handicapped older sister down to classes, while fixing her younger sister’s hopelessly limp ponytail, by confiding in her brothers. Those were her gifts, and she was grateful for them by the way she lived her life. Roberto, too, was grateful. He had picked up and started running without a thought, even though we were at the beginning of a domineering hill. I said a silent prayer of thanks for this small young companion who had miraculously showed me grace and hope in the simple act of running by my side.

If I were to live here for the next ten years, I’m not sure I would ever get used to so much death. I’m not sure I’d want to, either. But a theme of my experience over the past year and a half has been sheer admiration for the resilience of these kids, for everything they have suffered and continue to suffer. Yet they are able to shed their hurt, negotiate those rocky crevices, and continue up the hill to the other side. This I will remember and take with me wherever I go. And like Rosa, I want to live appreciating the gifts of each day.

Happy New Year!

Señorita Daniela: Crime Scene Investigator and Part-Time Ballroom Dancer

I danced the Waltz. Or at least, a semi-recognizable version of it. We were 26 godparents of the 26 boys and girls who celebrated their Quinceaños this year, one of the most important milestones of many Central American cultures. After accompanying my godson Marlon through the archway to signify his coming out into society, we all lined up, readied ourselves for the music to begin, and then with no apparent coordination, shuffled our feet around the cement floor in the school auditorium, each hesitant step more resembling a sad twice-removed cousin of the Waltz than the real thing. Still, anything more elegant would have been a false representation of the past years these children were celebrating.

The 15 year old birthday honorees matched in every possible detail, the color of the detailed nail designs of the dolled-up young ladies corresponding perfectly with the formal dress shirts the boys wore. And of course, the invitations, centerpieces, birthday cakes, and recuerdos (endearingly tacky reminder gifts that are integral to every major Honduran event) reflected the exact same shade of fifteen-year-old gold that cast its color over the entire evening. Marlon was my second godson of the week, since only two days before I had accompanied Yefry up to the stage to receive his diploma for graduating 9th grade. And of course, Marlon and Yefry join my original godson, Alejandro, whom we baptized back in July. Three times a godmother— I dare say I must be a saint now.

The Ranch is quieter now. School is over for the year and vacation courses won’t begin for another week. The younger kids’ days are occupied by normal daily chores—sweeping, mopping, and then sweeping and mopping again—and the older boys and girls left for ten weeks of internship practice in their vocational trade. They are scattered around the country, most in Tegucigalpa, but some as far away as San Pedro Sula where they have extended family members to stay with while they gain valuable work experience. For some of those kids, who are only 16 and 17 years old, this is their first time ever being outside of the Ranch for more than a day or two, and now they will be responsible for getting themselves to work every day on time and learning how to live more or less on their own. Many of them haven’t seen these extended family members in years, and I can only imagine the awkward first interactions as a paying tenant joining their home for a few months. Many of them were my students this year, and I am nervous to let them out into the world on their own. There is so much that could happen. I suppose this is a taste of what a parent must feel like.

I always enjoy getting to spend time off of the Ranch to work a little bit in real Honduras. Nearby Talanga is about as real as it gets: from the moment you step off the bus dust lodges itself in every pore of your dripping sweaty body, pigs the size of bears eat plastic Pepsi bottles in people’s front yards, barefoot street urchins sell gum and friend pork rinds while their mothers offer any pill you’ll ever need for half price, and wonderfully offensive Reggaeton music blasts from the dark inside of adobe homes. I give in to the heat and buy a Coke and frozen choco-banana for the rest of the walk to the Comedor where Merlin, our bilingual doctor (also a Ranch graduate), was going to do health check-ups on all of the kids.

I’d been to the Comedor once already back in June. There are now about 35 children from ages two to ten who get a full lunch there five days a week since the Passionist volunteers started the soup kitchen in November 2009. NPH Honduras is just beginning to be involved in support of the Passionist Comedor, hoping that one day soon our children will take part in community service.

Merlin set up in the front room and I positioned myself for optimal photo-taking. The first family came with their mother who was nursing her fourth child. The three kids seemed pretty healthy besides a few rotting teeth. They were a little short for their ages, but Merlin seemed satisfied, so he weighed them and then called in the next group of brothers and sisters. This little boy claimed to be nine, but I was certain that he couldn’t be more than five judging by his height and the size of his arms, which were hardly thicker than a broomstick. He came without shoes. Merlin traced his feet on a piece of paper, noted his name, and made a note to find shoes from the Ranch bodega for him. Next it was his sister’s turn. Merlin looked in her eyes, ears and nose, and then at her hair. He motioned for me to look closer above her ear. Her wiry black hair was a complete patch of white where hundreds of lice eggs had taken over. I couldn’t look at the eggs without seeing something black scurry out from Merlin’s light. This poor girl must be constantly itching, I thought. There’s no comb for a colony that size; she would have to be shaved.

Halfway through the checkups, a young girl came into the room holding a two month old newborn baby. He was a beautiful healthy boy who was just at the age for vaccine shots. While Merlin explained to the young mother to come to our external clinic for shots, I looked closely at the girl and recognized her as one of my former 9th grade students. She’d been in my classes when I first started teaching at the Ranch. She had left sometime this year after getting pregnant, I suppose once she came back from her internship practicum (hence that fear of letting your kids out into the real world). While NPH cannot support pre-marital pregnancies, they always do provide health and financial assistance for the young ladies when they leave the Ranch. It was a shock to see this girl six or seven years younger than I with a two-month-old son. I kept thinking of her looking up at me from her desk and smirking while she didn’t do her English work. We made eye contact. I smiled and told her she had a beautiful son.

My job title changed recently from Home Correspondent to Communications Officer. The change was decided by a unanimous vote of all Home Correspondents from the nine NPH houses at our conference in Nicaragua as we figured it more accurately reflects the billion projects that inevitably end up as our responsibility. Well I was in no way expecting job responsibility #862 that handcuffed me on Thanksgiving Day. It had already been a very long day. I was trudging through an urgent project but also had to cover the graduation of our kindergartners and 6th graders—a two hour event since the master of ceremonies was our much esteemed but eccentric Guatemalan librarian. No one is sure where she gets her money, or how old she really is, but we adore her gaudy jewelry and fish-net tights. I swear I have never seen this extravagant woman wear the same outfit twice: for Quinceaños she debuted in a sparkling purple floor length dress that really looked more like a mermaid suit than anything else, but of course she pulled it off with elegance and finesse.

It being Turkey Day and me naturally a vegetarian (and only more convicted since spending 15 months in a country where chicken feet and fried pork skins rule the lunch menu), I chose to bring the salad and help make the stuffing for our giant feast we had planned among the volunteers. I had just finished preparing the stuffing and salad dressing and was unlocking my office door when I received an urgent call from the National Director telling me to get down to the school pronto and to bring the camera. Well that was going to be easy: my office sits at the farthest most possible point from the school and it was HOT that day. I mean I had already pitted through my grey blouse and my feet were making squishy noises when they rubbed against my sandals. To make things more interesting, I had also just closed a somewhat illicit financial transaction in an underground alcohol purchase from our internal control office and was schlepping three bottles of French red table wine. Needless to say when your boss says run, you run, no matter how much your feet are slipping out of your flip flops, or how much the bottles clank in your side bag.

Fifteen minutes later I arrived at the school out of breath and completely unattractive, but that was of secondary concern to my responsibilities as official Ranch photographer. As it turned out, someone had broken into one of our storage units and stole an amplifier worth $2,000. Two police officers from Tegucigalpa were taking notes and checking out the crime scene. Luckily they had one obvious lead: two very clear footprints on the plastic bin that was housing the amp. Hmm, an interesting story, but not one that I thought the house would want me to write about and publish on the donor-based website. Still not entirely sure what my role was in being there, I held up the camera and asked what they needed pictures of. The police officer came over and pointed to the footprints: duh. Take pictures of the evidence. Or better yet, give me your very nice digital SLR Canon camera so that I can take pictures of the evidence. I gingerly handed over my extra appendage to the policeman half-astounded: of course two cops would make the hour trip from the capital to investigate a serious crime scene and wouldn’t bring their own stupid camera. Sigh. Honduras you never fail to find a way to surprise me.

Once the alleged investigator (I’m not sure he didn’t have a hand in it) handed me back my camera I asked for his email so I could get his photos to him. He hesitated a moment and looked at his partner and asked if they had internet. She shook her head. Nope, no internet. OK. Then in true Honduran form it took all of us gathered an unnecessary amount of time to figure out how we were going to get the investigator the photos of the crime scene that they took on my camera. Finally it was decided and I was free to cross the Sahara again up to my office. After such an event, I have no shame in tweaking my job description just a bit. To Communications Officer I proudly adjoin the title CSI Photographer.

Here I Am Again

It would be an exceptionally cruel trick to mismatch the socks of someone who is obsessive compulsive, and it would be even worse to then hide some of the pairs so that he can’t put them back together. Equally merciless would be to take away a “Type A” person’s means to write numerous organizational lists, and yet worse, to deny her the pleasure of checking off each box with a satisfying red mark. Such is the experience of organizing an event in Honduras: to even the normal, un-obsessive compulsive North American—who is usually well-accustomed to organizing at least minor get-togethers—the weeks of planning leading up to an event lead one to prefer to sit through a ten-hour overnight flight next to a shrieking baby with noxious gas rather than witness the infuriating chaos and squalid lack of progress that characterize the preparatory stages of a Honduran event. I’ll be the first to admit that I am among the most compulsive and greedy of list-makers, but my gluttony for superior organization and schedule was massacred within the first few months of moving here when I was promptly placed on several planning committees.

Hence, the sheer bafflement I continually experience when it actually works out. The Independence Day Parade in the nearby town of Talanga is one such example of distracted organization that unexpectedly births into a lovely presentation. It was to be our second year marching through the dusty streets alongside eight other local schools. I was still wiping the sleep crusties from the corners of my eyes when the whole Ranch had to assemble at 6:30 am to get on the buses for Talanga. Of course, we didn’t end up leaving for another hour and a half, but those kinds of nuisances are only a footnote passing through my culturally fluent mind nowadays. I walked around, camera in hand, scanning the groups of kids dressed up in various traditional folk wear, marching band uniforms, short glittery skirts and sparkling top hats. Others were costumed as historical Honduran heroes, like the native indigenous chief Lempira, who died fighting for liberty from the Spanish conquistadors, and Honduras’ president and first lady (wait, which president?). Still another handful of kids represented the flora and fauna of Honduras. You know you got the short end of the stick when you get stuck as a pile of leaves if the kid next to you is outfitted as a painted Indian with a bow and arrow.

We started marching as soon as we arrived in Talanga, since we had of course arrived late after one of the buses broke down on the way. The troops assembled with surprising alacrity, and the drum squad—our simplified version of a marching band— pounded out the rhythm for the two baton twirling groups and two color guard teams. I evaded marching for running around relentlessly snapping pictures for my shiny new job as Home Correspondent. After what must have seemed like miles of marching, the kids arrived at the finish where the judges’ stand was positioned, most passing by with cheesy smiles and well-practiced waves, though a few of the younger kids were apprehensive in front of so many people. This is understandable since few ever leave the Ranch until they turn 11 and get to go Pizza Hut once a year for their birthday. The parade in truth was a success, and the bus ride back to the Ranch was a silent copy of the ride earlier that day with the majority of the children collapsed onto one another, mouths open “catching flies” as they say here, passed out asleep for the ride home.

Since I’ve been back here after my short-lived sabbatical from the Ranch, life seems more and more normal, and I am increasingly attuned to the inner workings of the professional culture of Honduras. My new position as Home Correspondent never demands that I manage a group of 37 unruly 7th graders or decide how to grade four identical homework assignments, but it does try my patience in an entirely new way. Honduran professional culture is the living embodiment of the type of inefficiency and procrastination known distastefully in the business world as paper-pushing. One would think that with the birth of E-mail in the last century, most in the professional world would have developed some type of code of conduct regarding its usage, or would at least have figured out how to send an email by now. Apparently this country is sorely lagging in this area. Oftentimes I find that I’ve walked a mile or two by the end of the day in search of the information which I’ve been requested to gather. What would normally take an afternoon to accomplish by first world standards is drawn out over a few days until so-and-so can be caught in his office, or until the internet has been restored in a certain neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, or until someone decides to devote five minutes to the few semi-time-sensitive tasks at hand. This type of “relaxed” work ethic can make for some rather frustrating moments for we endearing list-makers, who may be forced to wait days, tormented until being able to check off the to-do box.

One facet of the new job that I am especially enjoying is self-management and flexibility, manifested in freedom to relate most “errands” that might catch my fancy to “work”. Last week, for example, our Ranch family grew by five: Pablo, Jayme, Nathanael, Isaac, and Genesis arrived from a town not too far north of the Ranch, toting both suitcases and impressive manners. New arrivals usually must stay a week in the clinic while all the diagnostic tests and assessments are done before they can move into the hogares (the homes), and one can certainly imagine the boredom that inevitably results after days on end cooped up in one building while a whole new world awaits outside. One afternoon last week, I took the five of them for an exploratory tour of the Ranch. Seeing my home of the last fifteen months from virgin eyes struck me as hard as an evil stepmother: with close to 500 kids, three full meals a day, farm animals, swimming ponds, and weekend karaoke, this place is Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island (minus cigars, plus daily machete chores) in comparison to the poverty that these kids would otherwise become intimate with. Little Isaac, voicing what I am sure the rest of the new family was thinking, could say little more than “qué grande!” and “qué bonito!” during our walk.

As much as I share the sentiments of Isaac’s family, it is always nice to spend some time away, even if just an evening. One recent Friday night my roommate Lauren and I were invited for pizza and wine (!!!!) to the home of a long-time Ranch couple in nearby Monte Redondo. It was a long, muddy walk from where the bus dropped us off back to their house; luckily, I was accompanied by many of my former students on their way home from school who live in a housing compound that was constructed after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. As we navigated the muddy trenches and strolled by Hondurans passing time on their porches and staring at the gringas surrounded by gaggling teenage girls, I had a flash of my life were I to have chosen to volunteer with the Peace Corps instead. I yelled promises to come visit as they girls ducked into the gates of the compound and continued down the road. Up ahead of us a brown cow tied to a fence was making a voracious fuss. Lauren, reading my irritated confusion, pointed across the road to where three men in cowboy hats stood sharpening shimmery knives. Saturdays in Monte Redondo are Soup Day, Lauren explained, because every Saturday morning they slaughter a cow. I guess I would be making a fuss, too.

Early Saturday morning, I had an assignment in the city at Casa de los Angeles, our home for severely disabled children. I’m at the point now where the differences between Honduran and American culture mostly escape my conscious registry, but as I watched out the window from the piece of crap taxi van down the hill to the city center, I witnessed one of the most disturbing images I think I’ve ever seen. It was a man, shirtless and yellow from several hours already dead, his head invisible for being firmly planted in the ground while the rest of his crouched body stuck out at an impossible angle, his feet and toes unmoving in the air. Twisted near him on the ground was his destroyed motorcycle. As if guarding nothing more shocking than the entrance to a neighborhood pub, five or six police officers stood with their guns off to the side, making room for a small crowd of photographers to close in on the body and snap photos for Sunday’s front page. The reaction from my fellow travelers in the van was none more forcible than a single murmur— “un muerto” (a dead body)–and conversation continued. I could feel the bile rise up the back of my throat while the cold yellow rubber of his skin flashed through my mind.

The casualty towards death in this culture and the hunger for gruesome news shouldn’t surprise me now: I’ve seen numerous newspapers whose bright red headlines and full-page color photos detail the deaths of yet another five youths in gang-related shootings (“see page 2 for information about three killed in car accident”). Honduran culture not only permits but encourages this type of grotesque, macabre news reporting. The normalcy of featuring snapshots of los muertos in the newspaper to me reveals a lack of respect and an invasion of dignity for the dead that sadly speaks to how the whole culture is incredibly desensitized to events that happen perhaps with more normalcy than they do in the United States. When we look at our traffic safety regulations and a social system that upholds severe punitive consequences for unacceptable behavior, whether it be driving a motorcycle without a helmet or participating in a gang, accidents ensuing because of such behavior are not received without at least some level of public shock simply if because we don’t read about them every day, even though they certainly happen. In Honduras, everyone is related to someone who participates in this behavior which is not regarded as “not normal”; many even partake in it themselves. It is a shame, then, that “el muerto” that we saw from the taxi had died, but it is also something that many have seen before on their commute to the city.

Shaken from the unexpected sighting but intent on my assignment, I arrived at Casa de los Angeles right in time for breakfast. There are twelve children living at this site, all with such severe handicaps that they need individualized attention every hour of the day. Some of them have absolutely tragic histories—one boy, for example, had been born normal but was so abused by his mother that he lost all ability to speak; his misshapen head hints at his terrible past before coming to Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos.

I took a plate of rice pudding from the kitchen and wheeled Darlin over to the table to start feeding her. At first every scoop seemed to end up on her bib more that in her mouth, the milky liquid running down her chin; but as we advanced into the meal we became a much better team. Her toothy smile grew bigger after every bite until she could no longer contain her excitement at the delicious tastes inside her mouth, and she let out repeated high-pitched shrieks, expelling bits of rice with each gleeful yelp. Even though some of those rice bits landed on my shirt, I could care less for being completely wrapped up in the innocent happiness that breakfast gave her. Darlin came to us with her older sister only last year and is five years old, the baby of our Tegucigalpa home. She suffers from MS but had also been abused during her two years at the public children’s home, where many of our children have spent some amount of time. Looking at Darlin, I was more relieved that she will always look forward to this happiness in the morning than I was sad for her reduced physical state or the fact that she has no other family but Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos. She has a home and a future, and that is something to say in a country that shows little concern for its people with physical and mental disabilities.

I won’t write more since this entry has already stretched out to over three weeks of events. I’ll try to keep this as updated as I can, but now you can also read my stories on the www.nph.org website under the Honduras section. You can also see more pictures there. For now, thank you for staying with me this long! Que les vaya bien.

Leaving Honduras

I am a retired schoolteacher. As I collected my magazines, scissors, pipe cleaners and Elmer’s glue from my II Nivel students at the end of the class period on Friday—my last official day in my volunteer teaching position— I was both saddened and relieved that I wouldn’t be hearing the shrill “TEACHER, VEN!!!” (“teacher, come!”) screamed at me across the classroom anymore, or hear the groans and “ay, no teacher!” when I pass out a worksheet. But I’m retiring from teaching with a definite satisfaction that it’s been a reciprocal relationship of understanding and enjoyment, not matter how difficult some of the students could be. Angel, for example, one of the more erratic and fickle boys of the younger classes, summed up perfectly in one sentence to me the tough love that was often revealed in interactions in my classroom: No tienes que irte, he said, looking at me with a half-scowl and half-concern (“you don’t have to leave”). I am taking that as an indication that maybe he enjoyed English class with Daniela, just a little.

There are clear moments when I only just grasp the full significance of what it is to be leaving. Mostly, though, July 31st is a date on the calendar that I am rattling off unthinking to coworkers and kids. I’ve already had my “despedida” celebration with my hogar, the formal planned goodbye that is customary (and I’ll be wearing my corny teal blue Honduras tourist t-shirt they gave me when I step off the plane in mid-August). What lies ahead of me still are those tasks that I want to avoid because they mean that the end is really here: cleaning out my room and packing, cancelling my residency, snapping final pictures, and of course, saying goodbye.

I’ve heard that reintegration is hard, and that it hits you sometimes weeks or months later when something small reminds you of one of your kids or of living in Honduras. There are some things that I am really going to miss, like the slow pace of life, the hilarious and innocent observations that the kids make every day, and the fluidness of sliding between Spanish and English in a matter of minutes. Then there are things that I am really, really going to miss: days like last Tuesday, for instance, where school was cancelled in a Ranch-wide effort to combat the dengue crisis by chopping threatening grass with machetes for five long hours. I just won’t get blisters or aches in my back quite like this in the Unites States.

I imagine that one of the most frustrating things for me in the reintegration process will be the inability to explain my experience to others. It’s not enough to simply say, “It was great. Hard, but great,” although this is precisely the nicely-wrapped answer that I think many will expect. Working on the ground level of a large institution like Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos—with all of its expected institutional flaws—definitely has had me furious and doubtful at times. Exasperation with the attitude of waste that I see sometimes among the kids; frustration that they are spoiled far beyond their ability to give thanks; their obliviousness to the privilege that is education, clothes, food, and time to play; and all of this feeding my own occasional doubts in the management of a well-meaning organization that sustains nine children’s homes throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. I think every volunteer goes through this period of despondency and disagreement, but eventually comes out of it to see the greater merits of NPH and, most importantly, what the alternative would be. At the end of the day, these children still don’t have mothers or a stable nuclear blood family and have come through hardships that, if they don’t excuse their behavior, certainly explain it.

This moment of realization that a life of poverty and insecurity is the alternative to growing up in a large children’s home like NPH only became truly real to me about a month and a half ago when I visited a site thirty minutes from the Ranch in Talanga, a typical Honduran town of dusty uneven streets, stumbling afternoon drunks, loud Reggaeton music streaming from the doors of the one grocery store, and unending numbers of shoeless, dirty children running around trying to sell gum and chips. I went with a few other volunteers to the Comedor Infantil, a children’s soup kitchen of sorts that some American Passionist volunteers opened in November in barrio San Diego, a neighborhood in Talanga notorious for crime and drugs. Each day about thirty-five to forty children aged 3 to 9 flock to this small cement-walled building before noontime to receive what is, for most of them, their one substantial meal of the day. The children are barefoot except for a few; they haven’t bathed for several days; their hair is thin and lice-ridden, their stomachs puffed, and their eyes are hungry and eager for the traditional rice and beans soup to come. But, they are smiling. Some come in school uniforms because their mothers or older siblings were able to find them shoes and several Lempiras to buy a snack at school. One boy, four years old, has gained five pounds since starting to come to the Comedor in January.

After spending several hours with these kids playing jump rope and make-believe with the donation of toys that had come two weeks before, we were invited back to the house of one brother/sister pair. The decrepit wooden home was the size of a small hotel room. The front room and the back bedroom were separated by a sheet strung from some twine. A television and three plastic lawn chairs set up on the dirt floor took up most of the space in the front room. A six month old baby was laying on one of the plastic chairs, naked and incredibly dirty, and was being cared for that day by a thirteen-year old cousin while the mother was out working, a normal situation in both small towns like Talanga and big cities like Tegucigalpa. One of the Passionist volunteers cleaned the baby off, fed her, and put a diaper on her while I went around back to play soccer with the boys in the hot afternoon sun. Later, as we waved goodbye to the kids and walked back towards the town center, passing shacks and more dirty-faced children walking through the streets, a strong sense of thanks and pride came over me for the work that NPH does. My girls in hogar or my students at school could be spending their days barefoot, out of school, hungry, or walking around dangerous neighborhoods. Nothing can ever fully replace losing a mother or make up for being abandoned and taken to the state children’s home; nothing can erase seriously abused sexually, emotionally, or physically. But opportunity, security, love, and a home where all of your siblings live, too, changes lives.

Last night was the Second Annual “Festival de la Canción,” a much-anticipated grandiose four-hour karaoke competition where our boys and girls from ten years old to twenty got up on stage one by one and displayed their sheer courage (and tone-deafness), crooning to such Latin hits as Te Amo and translations of The Backstreet Boys. I sat and cringed as Natalia, a rather new addition to our family, belt out something awful with the microphone too close to her lips. But I was thinking the whole time that any parent sits through these moments in their children’s lives, the necessary moments when they grow and discover themselves and feel what it is to be supported and loved. In contributing to the growth and personal development of the Natalias and Angels, in his or her right to communicate and be understood, we fulfill God’s ultimate goal for each one of us: to love others.

Thank you to all of my incredibly supportive family members and friends for contributing to the growth of these children through sending your support in care packages, letters, emails with kind words, in-person visits, and monetary donations to NPH, and of course by reading my story this year. We are all more interconnected than we can realize, and in showing love to one person, we really reach a dozen more.

Six Weeks and Counting

The rain is pouring down in full fledged buckets. I can almost set my well-worn Target digital watch to these daily afternoon tropical rainstorms. We are officially deep within the rainy season in central Honduras. Just two weeks ago, I sat in a bright, dry kitchen in Spokane reading the news on the internet of the start of hurricane season: flood warnings were high, and school and buses were cancelled as fears worsened that the bridges in Tegucigalpa were going to collapse over the rising rivers. The Ranch suffered minimal damage with just a broken water pipe here and there; but the impact of unceasing heavy rains on the subsistence farmers indicate much more severe consequences.

I am back on the Ranch after a lovely week at home to see my sister, Colette, graduate from G-Prep and to spend some time with my family (and to catch up on sleep). I won’t gush over all the unbelievably wonderful things about the U.S.A. that I rediscovered—dependably clean public restrooms, sushi, and Costco being just a few of the highlights that left me breathless—but I will say that I was surprised by how quickly and often my thoughts settled on my students, my girls, and this endearingly bizarre country that I’ve called home for the last 10 months. I knew I was back when I was in the customs line in San Pedro Sula and three different Honduran women came up to me at different times with a sob story of why they should get to cut in line. I didn’t let them.

Now I’m back on the Ranch after spending several days with two of my best girlfriends on the spectacular Caribbean island of Roatán, Honduras’ touristic pearl. It’s hard to think that two weeks ago I was flushing my toilet paper in the U.S., one week ago I was sprawled on a white sand beach and snorkeling with turtles, and today I am fending off fire-breathing 8th graders with my Expo marker and grade book.

However, it does feel comfortingly good to be back in the classroom with my game face on and #2 pencil poised to strike. As usual, one of my classes has stuck with me all through the day and has made me rethink how lucky I am to have been born in the United States and to have a loving, stable family. In my lowest level class, an especially remedial section with students ages 9 to 13 who have come to the Ranch without any previous educational experience (or only speaking an indigenous language), I was completely caught off guard by the topic that my young students brought up: crossing the border.

Just like any teacher, I've little memory of how we got onto the topic of immigration and what rights and privileges Americans have over Hondurans, but as I was led deeper into the discussion by their questions about passports, the police, and coyotes (the "specialists" who transport illegal immigrants across the border), it dawned on me why the students likely knew so much about border crossing. Angelo had told me weeks ago about his uncle working as a janitor at Sea World in California, and Carmelita and Michell have always boasted about their cousins in New York and Houston. Moises was most persistent with his questions: what exactly happens to you if the police catch you on the border without papers? Do you have to have a passport? What if someone who is already in the United States knows you and can vouch for you? They were more than disheartened with my answers: no papers, not legal.

I did my best to answer truthfully . . . and then Angelo, an 11 year old child with severe ADHD, shot me the million dollar question: why is it so easy for Americans to get passports and enter into Honduras and so hard for Hondurans to get passports and get into the U.S.? Try to explain that one to a group of remedial 11 and 12 year olds who can’t read or write in Spanish, but whose knowledge of the world outside the sheltered walls of the Ranch runs deep. Intelligence in a classroom isn’t everything: these kids have watched their family members experience things that I’ll hopefully only ever see in movies.

On a joyful note, the newest addition to the Ranch arrived several days ago: Scarlet Mirielle Flores is somewhere between three and five months old and is one of those babies who only ever seems happy. Our social work department went to pick her up from the authorities in near Olancho (north-central Honduras) where her mother was trying to sell her on the highway for 500 lempira (roughly $24 US). We are overjoyed to have this beautiful baby girl safely on the Ranch and sure to be loved.

And that's the news from Rancho Santa Fe. In only a few short weeks, the newest group of volunteers will arrive to replace my outgoing group. We’ll take them through orientation, introduce them to the kids in the hogares, and train them in their new jobs. I haven’t fully realized yet how soon to finishing my volunteer year I truly am, though I got a taste of it when I was home two weeks ago. It’s hard to imagine that someone else will be teaching my kids about Dante, alcoholism in Central America, and crossing the border. Oh, and English . . . I do teach English, too, occasionally.

One last note before I end this note: viva los Catrachos! Viva Honduras! Viva World Cup 2010!

For the Love of Literature

Dante saved the day. I’d almost thrown up my arms in desperation at the beginning of class with 9th grade after what had been an especially trying morning with 8th grade and 7th grade. A few weeks ago, the students were moved around into different groups, and my 7th grade grew to a whopping 35 people, with 8th and 9th also growing to more than 24 each. Lately, however, teaching has been a pleasure; I’ve found my groove and can scare any angst-ridden teen into working with a great smack on his desk with my large wooden stick (it’s true, I’ve done this—if the nuns could do it, why not me?). But on this particular morning, it was all I could do to usher them to their seats and stop talking over me. I was relieved that 9th grade would be coming to class after having spent the last two class periods shooting furious looks at those who would not.quit.talking.

I love my 9th graders because, well, they’re competent. There are some genuinely smart kids who genuinely like English, and when I ask them to buckle down and work, they generally do it. The current theme in their English textbook happens to be Israel and the kibbutz (odd, I know; but the least of my complaints with the book are its unexpected themes). Somehow, I got onto the topic of Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy, and from there it was a wild ride for the remaining 25 minutes of class. Each set of eyes was glued to the board as I drew Dante’s different levels of hell and explained a few of the eternal consequences of the sinners. Liars, traitors, adulterers, church leaders gone awry: bad behavior and its consequences—well-matched or not—is certainly one of the most well-known topics on the Ranch, proven by the absolute silence of my students while they listened.

It was incredibly fulfilling for me to see my kids light up about world-class literature. Granted, I love it, too, and I was beside myself with wanting to share all of Dante’s impressive craft. But it made me realize that these kids will go on to high school and hopefully university, and they will have the opportunity to learn about so much that they’ve never been exposed to before. Maybe Maria will fall in love with Dante; maybe Mainor will discover contemporary graphic novels; and Marjorie will realize that a whole world of culture, art and history exists outside of Honduras. I hope all these things for them; but, I am also realistic about the education system here. In just the past few weeks, there’s been talk about shutting down the public university because of strikes or re-opening it as a private institution. I also know that some of my students won’t last through the three years of service to the Ranch that it takes to earn a spot for college.

Dante stuck with me the rest of the day, through arts and crafts with 5th grade and through Mother’s Day cards with 6th grade. It even followed me to my out of control practice with 16 of my 8th graders who are going to read a poem in English at the Mother’s Day celebration. Overall, a very trying day; but, perhaps, next time one of the 9th graders lies to me about his homework he’ll think about the Inferno and where that sin would put him.

Just some other highlights and meaningful events that stick with me from the last week:
1. A hilariously Honduran Ranchero band with three grown men dancing traditional booty-shaking punta at the special employee lunch.

2. Teaching the three little boys in an HIV Support Group that I help to lead about always washing their hands, taking their medicines, and taking appropriate measures when they are bleeding. I can’t explain what it feels like to look into a six year old’s eyes and tell him that even though he has HIV, he can play and run and work like all of the other kids his age.

3. Two rogue kittens who had made a home in my desk at school springing out in the middle of class with 9th grade when I opened the drawers to look for a book. I screamed when I saw something furry that scurried . . . a wild cat chase ensued, with half of the girls up on their chairs and screaming and all the boys trying to catch the poor kittens. They finally did, and threw them out—but not before the whole classroom was overturned.

4. Sitting on the bus behind a Honduran couple, their small son, and their dog and watching, horrified and helpless, while the already drunk husband took huge gulps of Yuscaran (cheap hard liquor) then repeatedly swung at his wife while she blocked his hits with her elbow and shielded her son. The smell of alcohol penetrated the entire bus, and the man was so out of it that he couldn’t even sit up straight. He kept trying to push his dog onto his wife and son. I was absolutely horrified that this little boy was going to grow up in a poor, abusive, alcoholic family and that his mother was likely a daily victim. Just as horrifying was the fact that all the people on the bus simply watched every time the man raised his fist and called his wife vulgar names, as if it were a common soap opera.

5. Satisfying my secret whims by flicking an average of 4 fatty, flying beatles off of my mosquito net at night.

Seventh Inning Stretch

You know it’s bad when even the kids wrinkle their noses at what’s come inside the big red thermos for dinner. Apparently even hungry nine and ten year olds aren’t huge fans of mystery meat hearts and livers (was it chicken? Or leftovers from the lunchtime beef feast?). I know better after seven months than to try to dissect the various murky shapes swimming inside the soup. That seems to be a defining concept for me as I find myself just into the third quarter of my service year: I know better now.

I know better now how to manage and find success within the Honduran school system. I know that when they call a teacher’s meeting, I had better expect that at least thirty minutes will be dedicated to frivolous details, like deciding which day of the week to wear the red polo uniform shirt and which day to wear blue. I know better now than to leave thirty notebooks sitting out overnight on a table near a window in my classroom and expect them to still be there in the morning (they won’t be there, let me tell you). Most importantly, I know better than to force a kid to sit down and participate in English class when he is having an “off day.” Let me explain this one.

Sometimes I wish that there was someone following me around with a video camera and making a movie of my life. I’d watch it again if just to laugh, hard, and shake my head at the ridiculousness of my daily encounters. My classes these last weeks have been exhausting and energizing; successful and mutinous. I think someone could have done a “Dangerous Minds” type film, Honduras style, after one of my classes with remedial 6th grade a couple weeks ago. All of the boys with anger management problems and learning difficulties are in one class together (a brilliant plan), and Fredy , 13, was refusing to stop spitting spit wads and do the vocabulary word-search. After taking away his ammunition and weapon (an inkless pen), he yelled at me and spat out a number of colorful phrases that I won’t repeat here. Naturally, I ignored him and continued checking homework with the other students, so he raised his fist as if he were going to hit me. Without looking at him, I told him that I hoped he would make a good choice. Instead of hitting me, he threw a metal desk across the room, then jumped from desk to desk until he split the wood of one of my chairs. He eventually lost his steam and the other kids lost interest in him, but I remember being surprised with myself at some point that I was not shocked at his behavior. I was more shocked this week that every single one of my 9th graders turned in ALL their homework for the week ON TIME. In one day, I will have wonderfully intelligent students who desperately want to achieve, followed by a volatile, aggressive pre-teen clinic case bordering on bi-polar, and then kids who are either special-ed or age fifteen and unable to read or write in Spanish. Academy Awards material? Perhaps.

The other weekend, I visited another “casa hogar” just outside of Tegucigalpa. It’s a small retreat center where only nine boys live and are taken care of by an older woman, one cook, and one tutor who comes to give them lessons every day. The psychologist on the Ranch, who works at several children’s homes, invited me so that these boys could have some exposure to someone outside of their small enclosed circle. I was pre-warned that these boys were serious cases, often getting in fist fights over soccer games and very fond of using Fredy-type language. I was amazed, though, after spending a Saturday with them at their respect, politeness, and obedience. Each boy, who comes from a serious background of broken families and extensive government-sponsored children’s homes, made an effort to make me feel welcome and to participate in the activities without a single fight. The psychologist told me that it had been an unusual day, and that they were behaving so well just because I was there. NPH, he explained to me, is the largest and best-run of the children’s homes in our part of Honduras, in terms of having a system down and producing capable young adults who can enter into the work world and support themselves. But my experience with these children outside of NPH who come from similar backgrounds as the kids on the Ranch got me thinking about our kids and why so many seem to be so—well—bad. What is the connection between bad behavior and growing up in a rural children’s home where you are just one out of 500 kids; where the same people that are in charge of you in school are in charge of you at “home”; where the attention of two parent figures is divided among 25 children of the same ages; where privacy and personal space are negotiable or nearly non-existent; where everything is provided for you, but shared, and therefore not valued; and where the faith that is taught is made about as exciting as a plate of beans. Perhaps the behavior of the Fredys isn’t so unexplainable.

I’ve observed over the last seven months that without the small, intimate social dynamic of the family, it is inconceivably hard to teach values to children. Without the security of the undivided attention and unconditional love of a good parent, it takes an exceptional child to rise above the overwhelming status quo to develop a strong moral character. Where is my motivation if my reward for doing my chore and completing my homework is to avoid being reprimanded by the tío or tía of the hogar and getting to eat dinner that night? I don’t mean to say that all children on the Ranch are lacking a values system; just like everywhere in the world, there are the numbered golden children who are dubbed prodigies by we volunteers by the mere fact that they’ve been on the Ranch so long and haven’t been turned into Frankeniño.

Today I experienced a purely golden moment where time stopped for me and I was truly happy, truly thankful, truly in love with my girls. We’d been working in the hot sun for an hour watering all the newly planted trees that HSBC bank donated last weekend. All the girls were in a good mood after running around and playing in the water fountains, filling up empty 3 liter Pepsi botles and then dumping it all out over the baby greens. Halfway into our long walk back up to hogar from the school, one of the older boys in his service year pulled up in a big John Deere tractor, pulling a large, empty trailer to the farm. Like most people, he was unable to say no to the kitten eyes of 9 year olds, and he let us all climb up in the back of the trailer to give us a ride back to the hogar. The girls were absolutely ecstatic: a four minute ride in a rickety old trailer was surely the best thing that could have happened to them on a normal Saturday. I watched my grinning, laughing chicas from the back of the trailer, unable to keep from laughing and smiling myself when they cheered and screamed at each jerk of the trailer as the tired balding wheels jumped with each deep rut in the dirt road. For a moment, I was transported back to my own childhood rides with my siblings in our Cub Cadet tractor trailer: dirty and hot from the late August desert sun, but just a happy kid, on top of the world as I’d coast by the golden wheat grasses from my throne of metal and plywood. The four minute spent riding the rough Ranch road today filled me with a familiar golden sweetness: it was spontaneous, simple happiness caught in its most pure moment and condensed into a delicious butterscotch melting slowly on my tongue, the honeyed rays of its sweet richness shooting out and soaking us with gold. The girls descended from the trailer giggling and grinning still, shrieking over and over: “Qué rico! Qué rico!”

So I have just under five months left. That’s still a mighty long time when I consider how thoroughly each day drains me to the bones. I have visions of myself at 50 sitting around a table with friends and sharing stories about our hardest jobs. I have plenty of more challenging jobs in my future, that I do not doubt; yet, it’s hard to imagine one with as many corresponding and conflicting social and cultural aspects. In what other job in my life will I—in one day—catch an entire class cheating on their English homework, serve a lunch that has chickens’ feet in it, embrace an HIV+ child, and explain to another child what chocolate is (yes, there is a new girl in my hogar who had never heard of chocolate before). In five more months, I am sure there will be more Fredy days, but there will also be more spontaneous butterscotch moments, too. I know better now than to think otherwise.