May

Well we feel like time is flying by. We have less than three weeks of school left and can feel the students (and teachers too) losing focus. We've been hiking on the weekends, watching many bootlegged copies of movies (oh yeah we saw the new X-men movie before it even came out in theaters), eating out at our favorite (cheap) restaurants and playing cards with other teachers. Copan is definitely a small town and we love it but will be ready to have a little variety.

The school had a mother's day celebration the Friday before Mother's day. Each class presented a song or poem or dance for the mothers.
Hard workers setting up for the event. The tent in the background was for the students so they wouldn't have to sit in the sun.
David being a caballero and walking all the mothers to their seat on the pine covered walkway.
Here the moms are watching the program as kids are running wild.
They had many of the home ec. projects on display and then were given to the moms. Here are the frames my students made. They are really cool and they embossed the metal themselves. However they worked on these for about 4 months which in my opinion is WAY too long for a project like this. (I don't teach that class)

And as a tribute to our favorite internet cafe I thought I'd post this picture. Ever, the waiter/cashier/barista made this for us. We had to take a picture. It is nice to know locals and get special treatment.

Rain!!

Loud thunder, strong lightning and intense rain. The rainy season has begun. Each day now in the afternoon you can year the thunder and feel the sky about to open and dump all the excess that it has. We are happy to be past the dust stage and on to a more refreshing, cool time of year. We now have to plan our afternoon outings so that we can be inside when the rain starts up. The best part however about this kind of rain is that it soon lets up and the nice weather returns. As I write this the rain pounds right outside.

Ahhh. May in Honduras.

Gracias

This weekend we went on yet another adventure. This time it was to a town called Gracias that is about 4 hours away from Copan. The town got its name from the conquistadors who were hiking through the mountains looking for a place to settle and they came upon this flat land and exclaimed "Gracias a Dios" Thanks to God that we found this land. It was nice to see more of Honduras since usually our trips take us into Guatemala. We left Friday morning and arrived in Gracias around midday. We found a reasonable hotel and dropped off our stuff and then headed out to see the town.
First stop, Choco-Bananos. A must have and for only 10 cents each you can't beat them.
We then went to tour the old military fort. It was beautiful and from there we could see out over the whole town.
From there we went to see the churches in town. Gracias was the first capital of Central America and played a big part in the history of Central America and Honduras as well. For that reason there is a big Spanish influence there.
We took a break for some licuados or "smoothies". I ordered my favorite drink Limonada which usually means cold fresh lemonade. As I took my first sip I noticed the container of CountryTime Lemonade on the shelf. AHHH I was so dissapointed.
On Saturday we took a moto-taxi or Tuk Tuk out to the Aguas Termales or Hot Springs. These hot springs are infinitely better than the ones in Copan and the entrance fee is half the price. We spent the day there enjoying the water. David and Zach perfected their back flipping abilities.

Digging Holes

I had one of my favorite teaching moments this week. We are reading the book "Holes" by Louis Sachar in my class. I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it or seen the movie. It is about a boy who gets wrongly accused of a crime and has to go to a sort of correction camp where they have to dig 5ft holes every day to "build character." In reality they are helping the warden look for a treasure.

Anyway, we were reading it and I asked my students how long it would take them to dig a hole with a 5ft diameter and 5 ft deep. They commented that it would be easy. Then I had an idea...we would try it out. Back behind the school are trails and barren land. They have exactly 12 shovels at the school and 2 picks which is a perfect number for my 14 students. My plan was to put them in 2 groups and have them try to dig a hole. I expected them to try and then get frustrated and give up after 10 minutes. To my surprise they LOVED it! So instead of spending 1 part of a day digging holes we spent 3 afternoons working out in the sun. I couldn't believe it and was laughing when I could use "hole digging" as leverage for good behavior. They knew I would take it away from them and make them go inside if they weren't working together. They even worked really well together and encouraged everyone. Also, everyone worked which is a change from their group projects in class. I think they learned just as much from that project as from anything I can do in the classroom. Also now they can identify with the book

My favorite question was... "Miss what are we going to do when we finish these holes" And I responded "Dig more holes of course" What I find most surprising is that no one asked my why we were doing it. I would have told them...to build character.
One group making use of the pick. Notice Kency taking control. She was the most skilled at digging in this group.

What we love

I have been reflecting lately about our experience here in Honduras. We realized we only have two months left of our experience here. School is out in about 6 weeks and then soon after that we will be returning home. We are getting excited about planning what comes next in our lives. I thought I'd take a moment to share what I love about life in Honduras.

We love….

-The pace of life. Simplicity

-No bills. Our electric bill is taped to our gate each month and we are yet to owe any money. (the government subsidizes a portion of it and we don’t even use that much)

-No major responsibilities

-That we get to spend a lot of time together.

-The fact that we can eat out all the time since food is cheap.

-The wad of money David gets to carry in his pocket (They don’t use coins here or Credit cards)

-The fact that you can walk away from Copan in any direction and find yourself on a beautiful hike overlooking green mountains and valleys.

-Walking everywhere.

-The challenge and reward of learning a new language

-When the laundry dries in only a couple of hours

-Our shower (when there is water that is)

-Walking to school in the morning when the sun is just coming up and the town is waking up.

-Eating all sorts of fruit (right now mangoes, watermelon, papayas and oranges)

-Sucking on oranges

-That it gets light at 6am and dark at 6pm all year

-Being able to buy any common food product right down the street. No driving to the store to pick up a last minute item.

-Hammocks

-When our students are just as excited about a lesson as we are (this doesn’t happen very often)

-Walking around town and running into at least a couple of people we know.

What we do not love:

-Dust. Right now since it has not rained in a long time the dust on the roads is about an inch thick in some places. Every time we walk down a hill, which we do all the time, we think about the true meaning of bite the dust as we almost slip and fall.

-When the water or power goes out. Yesterday I was showering at night and as I was going to rinse out my hair the power went out. Darkness and cold water. I guess they give us a reason to have romantic candlelit evenings.

-The heat, sometimes. Our new afternoon activity includes coming home from school and sitting on the couch with our little fan pointed directly at us.

And as a little tribute to the students I love (most of the time) I will post a picture of them.

Sawdust carpets

Well we are officially in our last quarter of school. Zach let us know that there are only 34 days left of school. Wow time flies.

Semana Santa here in Copan is a very big deal and members of the Catholic church create rugs that cover the street made out of sawdust. They first put down a layer of natural colored sawdust over the entire street. They then fill it in with colored saw dust using templates. They started at 5pm on Thursday and worked all through the night to finish them. You can look at them all day Friday and then they have a procession that walks on them and destroys them late at night. It was very fun to see them but it was crazy to think that all that hard was destroyed just hours later.


Here is Zach watering the carpets to keep the dust down during the day. This is his second year helping with them.




There were also some carpest made out of pine needles and flowers. This one was complete with watermelon!

We have also been busy this week because a group from our church is here from Arizona. They are a photography group here working on a project. We spent a lot of time helping them and many of our friends were part of it.

This is a very sweet old couple from church. He cuts wood for a living and she is a midwife. They were so excited to be a part of this.

Semana Santa in Belize, Flores and Tikal Guatemala

We just got back yesterday from our Semana Santa trip. We needed to renew our visas and instead of just letting us cross the Guatemalan border (which is about 20 minutes from Copan) we have to leave the CA-4 which means the four central american countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. So the real reason we traveled to Guatemala and Belize this week was for the visas but we were excited to have an excuse to get to see more of Central America. The highlight of our trip was getting to see the ruins in Tikal, Guatemala but we will start from the beginning....

We started our trip with the other teachers from the school. The school got a bus to take us through Guatemala to a town called Puerto Barrios where we took a boat into Belize. After our 3 days in Belize our group split and we all went different directions. David, Zach, Zach's brother John (who is visiting from the US) and I went up through Belize and over to Guatemala and wen to see the ruins in Tikal.
Here is the sunrise that David saw the first morning we were there.

We weren't too impressed with Belize. We stayed right on the coast in this very sleepy town. Our hotel was sort of a run down house/construction site. We would compare Punta Gorda, Belize to what we imagine the deep south being in the US. We haven't been there to confirm this so we'll let you decide for yourself. They speak English in Belize...well actually a mix of English, Spanish and a Creole language that we can't understand.
We tried to look for good pictures to post of Belize but seriously this is about all we have. There was hardly anything worth remembering in that town. We only visited one city there and know others who have enjoyed other cities in Belize. We won't write it off yet.

We left Punta Gorda on Monday and took a bus to Belmopan and then another bus to the border with Guatemala. We then went through customs which was a surprisingly pleasant experience and then took another bus into Flores, Guatemala. Flores is a small island in the middle of a lake that is in the bigger city of Santa Elena. It is connected to the edge of the lake by a bridge and was an amazing place. We arrived in Santa Elena and then got a minibus ride into Flores. We stayed at this really nice place with a lake view and spent our time there walking down the colonial streets and observing the Semana Santa celebration there.

Here is a view from our balcony to a little beach that we went swimming in.
The sunrise from our balcony. Once again this is David's picture. I was still asleep.
We really liked the food there. One night we enjoyed dinner literally on the lake edge. The warm wind was blowing and we watched the sun go down as we cooled off with iced lemonade. We also had some good tacos in the central park. A couple of the nights we got ice cream and watched a parade of a statue of Jesus be carried around the city and end up at the Catholic church.

Our second day there we got a shuttle at 4:30AM to go to Tikal. Tikal is located about an hour from anything. You can stay in the one or two hotels they have there but it is much more reasonable (and fun) to stay in Flores and get a shuttle there for the day.

We went on a tour of the ruins and walked for about 5 1/2 hours. The thing about tikal is that the ruins are BIG. The actual site is huge and the size of the ruins are what make it famous. We had the choice of going on the English tour with about 30 other people or the Spanish one with 10. We were so excited that we could go on the Spanish tour (Zach translated for his brother) and enjoy a smaller group. Our guide was really funny and we really enjoyed having him give our tour. You can climb up many of the ruins. This may not look that high but believe me it was. At the top I didn't want to take my arm off the wall because I was afraid I would fall off. There is no safety rope keeping you back. Plus our tour guide kept telling us that people have fallen off the ruins and died. Here is David on the top of Temple 5 overlooking Temple 1 which is the most famous of all the Tikal ruins. He is laughing because I keep freaking out that he is going to fall over backwards.
We had great weather for our trip. They kept telling us we should go early in the morning because once it gets hot no one wants to be walking around. This particular day it was cool and perfect for hiking around in the jungle. The ruins are surounded by jungle and from the tops of the temples for as long as you can see are different shades of green tree tops.
Here Zach and David are showing us how these sacrifice altars were used.
This is Temple 1 or the great jaguar temple. You unfortunately cannot climb this one but the one directly across from it you can.
We enjoyed our time in Flores so much that we really wanted to stay the rest of the week. However, seeing as it is Semana Santa (Holy Week) buses are not running on Friday or Saturday. We were hoping to come back on Saturday but since we found out that we wouldn't be able to get a bus, we had to come back yesterday (Thursday). We got up early and took a bus all day long to get home. We traveled for about 10 hours and arrived back in Copan around 5pm. We were just in time to see the beginnings of the building of the sawdust carpets that they make on the street. We will post more about this another day.

Overall we had a very enjoyable trip and our opinion of Guatemala has improved each time we have visited it. Keep in mind that these pictures do not do it justice. It is really hard to capture the size and beauty of these ancient sites.