Art for Humanity

These notes were not originally intended for the internet. They were two email messages Nate sent to me and to his mom. They were written in response to my question to him about his Easter break from the college where he is volunteering with us. After reading them, I asked for permission to post them because they give good insight to what volunteering with us is like and also insight into visiting Honduras. I hope you enjoy then as much as I did. Glen Evans

Hi Glen,

Great to hear from you.  My Easter break was fun and extremely interesting.  I’ll write a little about what I did in each place I stopped, but first, I have to tell you how gratifying it was standing on the side of the road in Zambrano with Elias, Matt, and the girls just before we all went our separate ways.  It had only been a week for me here, and I’d only taught a few classes, but when I hopped my bus to Comayagua and everyone waved and wished me well, I had a really warm feeling knowing I’d get to come back and resume working with these people after break.  (As I’m sure you can understand, I was worried this would not be the case before I got here.)

Comayagua was my first foray into the hot, noisy, urban side of Central American life.  I was there two and a half days.  My game-plan whenever I go to new places and have a wide-open schedule is usually
to roam around and just see what I stumble upon.  In Comayagua, I went to cafeterias, bookstores, the town square, and a few different bars and restaurants.  I found that, in the evenings, when I stopped in
someplace for dinner, it was often just me and two or three employees (usually family) — such a fantastic way to work on my Spanish and soak up Honduran culture.  One night I sat quietly in a cafeteria and watched most of Pirates of the Caribbean (with no English subtitles) with a woman and her daughter and nephew.

After the city, I wanted to get to Lake Yojoa.  I had no plan for where to stay, but I bought a ticket to La Guama and met a Honduran on the bus who’d lived in Colorado.  He was very cordial and helpful.  He
suggested I stay at the Agua Azul Hotel, which I did for the next two nights.  My first night, I met some missionaries from Georgia and a man named Bryan.  Bryan and his wife and daughter asked me to join them for dinner.  He’s associated with the Peace Corps.  We had a great conversation, covering many topics personal and professional.  They invited me to stay at their home in Teguc for a night before I leave the country (which I’ll probably do the day before my flight out of San Pedro on the 28th).  In addition to the Americans at the hotel, I got to know and like the staff quite well.  They were impressed (if a
little shocked) when I asked for a bar of jabon so I could wash my own clothes, and they gave me a good deal on a kayak rental, which I used to make my way across the lake, East-West, and back again.

Sticking close to the lake, I met Matt in the Los Naranjos/Las Vegas area.  We had a lot of good times wandering about.  I stayed another two and a half days at the D & D Brewery, which I enjoyed at first
because it’s so comfortable and houses so many English speakers, but I was glad to get out of there when I did.  It was starting to feel like the Hotel California.  Ultimately, the D & D is a place in Honduras for American, European, and Scandinavian backpackers who are pretty
much appalled by Honduras and Hondurans, so poor and dirty and backwards.  Apparently, in the opinion of these fearless travelers, the most effective way to practice speaking Spanish is to sit at a shaded table with a textbook, a notebook, a pitcher of beer, and a bunch of English speakers – never mind the fact that there’s a small, accessible Honduran town (Los Naranjos) two minutes away, on foot.

I made my way over to Los Naranjos my second day there.  I noticed they had a basketball court in decent shape, so I asked John, the caretaker at the D & D, if he had a basketball he could loan me.  He didn’t, but he had a baseball and a glove, so I wound up walking the streets, tossing a ball into the air, hoping some kid with a glove of his own would run out and want to play catch.  That kid never materialized, but I did meet a teenager riding around aimlessly on his bicycle.  I asked him if he had a basketball, and he said no, but he motioned toward the court, so we went.  There were a couple other, younger kids hanging out between the basketball court and the adjacent soccer field.  Then a few more showed up.  Before long, we had a women’s sized basketball with enough air in it to dribble and a friendly game of 2-on-2 going.  You gotta love sports and music, if only for the way they make language barriers irrelevant.

Back at the D & D, the American staff and a few of of the guests asked me where to after this, and I said the beach, and they all did double takes — the beach during Semana Santa?!?  Don’t you know, they asked, that every Honduran that can afford it goes to the beach for Semana Santa?!?  With that, I paid my bill and headed for the beach.  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted Tela or La Ceiba, or both.

When I arrived at the bus terminal in San Pedro, I began to wonder if I should have listened to the folks at the D & D.  So hot, so crowded, so miserable.  It was early afternoon and I would have had to wait
until evening for a bus to Tela, and I had no place to stay anywhere.  So I bit the bullet and spent $50 for a cab ride, which was a nice breather from the masses.  (There I go, sounding like an elitist backpacker.)

Tela was tough at first.  Thursday of Semana Santa.  One massive party, and I did not get the impression I was invited.  I paid L800 for a lousy hotel room and was pretty overwhelmed by the 20,000 extra people in town.  There was hardly a spot on the entire beach to put down a towel, and I was the only gringo in sight.  The next night I found a better place to stay, made friends with some
families who ran small eateries, talked to a bunch of gypsy Argentines who spoke English, and generally started to feel really comfortable moving about the small city.

In the evening on Good Friday, I watched the procession of the bloody Christ staggering through the streets.  It was immaculate.  I watched from the doorway of a restaurant with the family that owned the place.  We were silent, staring at the six guys who slowly beat snare drums, followed by six more who dragged the chains, followed by the young man who played Jesus, followed by two rows of a couple hundred people with solemn faces holding candles.  I’ll never forget it.  (I happened to run into Alex on the streets in Tela, and when we got back to school, I found out she was one of the candle-holders on Good Friday.)

The next day, I caught a bus to La Ceiba.

In Ceiba, I went straight to the Amsterdam Hotel and ordered a cheap room for two nights.  It was Saturday night of Semana Santa, and I was so beat from Tela that I decided to lay low and read and eat and sleep the remainder of the day away.  It didn’t matter that the noise from all the festivities was like a jet engine next to my bed.  I was beat.  Easter morning, almost everyone except the locals were on their way back to their homes.  Sunday and Monday, the beaches were lovely and quiet and
the cafes were so pleasant.  As you know, many of the business owners on the Coast (especially in tourism) speak decent English, so for my dinners, I went to the bar next to my hotel and had long, fascinating conversations with a group of relatively successful, middle-aged locals.  They had questions about American and international law, and some of them had kids in college or working in the States.

Talking to the backpackers at the D & D whose only purpose was moving from place to place, and then doing that very thing myself, I was SO GLAD knowing I had the school to come back to.  In my opinion, not having family in this country, this is by far the best place to spend more than three days at a time in Honduras, probably in all of Central America.  It’s cooler, quiet, more scenic and spread out, and the swimming and hiking one can do up in these mountains tops anything I might have paid for traveling around.  And it’s nice to be able to go out exploring alone, not having to make small talk with guides or strangers.

On Tuesday morning, from La Ceiba, I caught a hot, crowded bus back to Zambrano.  (And when I say “hot” I mean like when you’re sitting idle and you can feel the sweat running down over your rib-cage.)  I was the first one to the restaurant, then Zuelmi, then Martha.  It was great watching the way the girls embraced each other upon their return, sad though they were to be gone from home again for so long.  They seem very much like sisters to me, and I doubt they would object to that characterization.

I guess I’d better wrap this up.  Joe and Hailey are sitting here in the classroom, chatting about the rest of the day.  They say they don’t want or need to get online any time soon, but I suspect they’re lying.

It will be great to see you and talk to you at length when you get here.  Til then…

Nate

This is a second message to his mom.

Hey Mom –

I hope you are well.  Too bad about the lousy weather back home, and from what I can tell, I’m not missing much good baseball (except by the Twins’ opponents) lately either.

I don’t think I could be too much happier with the way stuff’s going here at the school.  Just in the last day or two, I started getting the feeling that some kind of near-perfect harmony had been achieved somehow – between the people, the environment, the work we’re doing, and the time we’re afforded away from work.

I teach in the classroom one or two hours each morning or afternoon, and then I make myself available during meal time and leisure time, and then for another hour in the classroom before bed, for any of the girls who want extra practice.

What do I teach?  It varies.  These young women are only about three months into a five-year “leadership degree,” the key building block of which is the ability to read, write, and speak English fluently.  So, at this very early stage, we’re using English as best we can to have discussions on subjects like U.S./Honduran history, politics, music, and religion, and then the other 60-70% of the time we’re doing more traditional English teaching out of a textbook.  I like this mix because it gives me the freedom to try to make my classes more interesting to this group of bright, young adults than day after day of ”tenedor….fork” and “buy….bought” would be.  But the boring stuff is obviously very important too, and that’s the material they’re tested on each week.

So, for example, for one class, we did some irregular verbs and vocab words for kitchen utensils and food.  I would pronounce the words for them, ask them to repeat, and then use in a sentence, then use again in a sentence with a verb in the past tense.

Then, for another class, I tuned the guitar and taught them the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” along with the meaning of the verses and the cultural significance of both the song and Dylan.  I wrote the lyrics on the chalk board, and they copied them in their notebooks.  I sang each verse solo, then we all sang together, and when we had it down, we invited the other teachers and some of the farm workers to come in for a three minute concert.  The ladies are gifted singers (and dancers) and they certainly don’t mind showing it.

Additionally, as more of an ongoing project, I invented an imaginary “2012 Meeting of Women Small Business Owners” to be held in NYC and to which all the students are invited.  For starters, for homework, I asked them to write up a couple sentences about “the purpose of my small business” and present it to the class, then I helped them fix the problems regarding sentence construction.  When we revisited the project yesterday, I informed them that they’d each been given a grant of $20,000 to get their respective businesses started, and I asked them to come back with another short paragraph explaining what they intended to do with the money.  Many of the girls’ paragraphs were very rough, but their ideas came through, so I knew they’d given the assignment plenty of thought and done their best with the English part.

For one of my first classes, I used some US State Dept info about politics and the govt in Honduras and asked them to tell me as much as they could (in English) about the people and parties in power here.  Do you like current President Lobo, and why or why not?  Then we talked some about the United States, Obama, etc.  The day after bin Laden was killed, I found a statement from the Honduran Sec of State online and had the students help me translate it into English.  Also, more to satisfy my own curiosity, I pulled up a CBS clip of Obama’s announcement of the news on one of the laptops here, and many of the girls (who had just been dismissed from class) shushed each other and came to look on over my shoulders.  They couldn’t understand much of it, but they like Obama a lot, and I think the fact that he is a smart, good-looking younger guy with brown skin may have something to do with it.

I have concluded that, in order to feel I’m doing a good job in the classroom each day, I need to accomplish two things – 1) make the students more comfortable using the English language and 2) make them think critically about the world around them and where and how they might want to fit into it.

As far as the English part goes, sometimes I invite the girls who are interested to hike with me during free time (to the church on Sunday, to the waterfall in the evenings) and sometimes they invite me along with them…and to me, THAT’S when the bulk of the practicing, of English for them and Spanish for me, gets done.  And what a joy these times are.  Sometimes, I just walk along and listen to them talking amongst themselves.  They forget I’m even there and I can tune them out if I want to and just take in the absolutely incomparably beautiful scenery.  I wish you could see it.  Maybe someday you and Cheryl will make a trip down here.

When I’m not working, I try to put in at least an hour, at least 5 or 6 days a week, with my Bar Exam materials.  Often times, when I’m studying, I’m sitting at our shaded picnic table with two or three baby chicks and a mother hen pecking around in the dirt at my feet.  (Now you know where we get our eggs for breakfast.)  Or some dirty little dogs, or a few American and/or Honduran toddlers.

Other fun stuff — I hiked to the place in the river where it becomes falls recently, and dunked my head in the water, and looked down over the 50+ foot drop off, and out into the huge, green, rocky canyon.  I learned to drive the motorcycle our director just purchased – more of a dirt-bike really, which is great for speeding through the trails and open fields.  After that, I did “the jump” which is what they call leaping off a big rock on the river bank, down 25 feet into the water.  People do it during Semana Santa (Easter week) for fun and as some sort of observance of faith.

Yesterday, we got the farm workers and a few of the girls and teachers together for another baseball game out in a cow pasture near the school.  I didn’t get so much as a base hit, and I made an error that cost us the game, but I like to tell myself I planned it that way.  Afterwards, I joined them in a soccer game, which was fun but exhausting.

I’ve got exactly three weeks left here at the school, then a couple days in a couple cities en route to my flight home.  I’m not sure what all this amounts to, but I know it’s all been good.  If you’ve got any new news from home, work, etc, please send it along when you have time.

Love,
Nate