Acne, Bugs, Sleep, and Poop.

So I have pretty much decided that I have regressed back to my teenage years. This isn’t solely because I have acne, hole myself up in my room so I don’t have to talk in Spanish, secretly drink beers on the top floor of a hotel under the surname “Taffy Voorhis,” (first pet, street I grew up on) and have a 9:00 curfew. It is apparent in my every day conversation when I come home to eat with my host family.

“How is your day going?”

“Fine.”

“What did you do in school today?”

“Learned Spanish.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep.”

 “It’s hot today.”

“Siiiiigh.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my host-family. They are great people. And they really do care which is evident in the copious amounts of food they try to feed me. But after a long day of climbing/falling up/down mountains and building stoves out of shit, it’s hard to “immerse” in anything but a bucket full of water and soap. And what am I doing right now? I’m totally in my room typing on my computer and rocking out to Tenacious D. If only I had a poster of the 1995 UNC Women’s Soccer Team on my wall my regression would be complete. At least I don’t get picked on by the cool kids anymore. We are all cool kids… in the tree-hugging peace corps volunteer kind of way….

Wait…. Are piropo’s considered picking on the uncool kids??? DAMNIT!

So Carlos (my program director) somewhat fixed my computer issue. He magically “found” a copy of Windows XP that had fallen off of the back of a turnip truck called “Bit Torrent” and reinstalled it on my computer. I told him I had a product key but he looked at me with a furrowed brow and told me not to use it because he had one… but when I got back to the states to visit I should install my original version again. Personally, I think this is totally legit.

The only down side is that the version of Office he put on my computer is in Spanish. So every time I try a shortcut key something completely strange happens. Like “Ctrl S: turns on my underline. “Ctrl U” opens a new document. “Ctrl B” finds and replaces things. So now the only thing I could always count on, Microsoft (cough cough), has left me even more confused in Honduras. God damnit, I just tried to save my blog and look what happened. Stupid Spanish. Anyway, on the plus side my computer works again and Carlos has promised to bring me the Adobe products and a few other fun pieces of software that are totally on the up-and-up. What a good guy.

I had a sad realization today. The salty cheese (remember, there are two kinds) doesn’t really melt. I got some tortillas with dinner today that were like 359 degrees (most people would think that this is good service. I think this is in retaliation for not eating my 6 pieces of refried-bean-toast this morning) and I tried to put my salty cheese in it so I could make myself a melty egg-bean-salty cheese taco. But my cheese didn’t melt. Oh well. I still made tacos out of my dinner. Take THAT Honduras.

Today my host sister made the most delicious cauliflower ever. She made it with the actual melty cheese. It was so good I wanted more. I decided that this was a set-up to try to get me to ask for more so that they could start giving me two giant plates of food instead of one. I am on to their little game. I didn’t ask for more. HAH!

Hey guess what, I just learned that “save” is “Ctrl G” for “Guardar.” I picture in my head a little Honduran man with a rifle protecting my Word documents…. I call him Larry.

So I totally got attacked by a bug in my room last night. No, really. It attacked my face like Rocky attacks a side of beef. At first I just brushed it away. (This is what I have come to. At this point I just brush bugs off like it is no big deal. I do this in my sleep too. Back in the states I would have woken up and danced around my room with a shoe until the bug was smooshed. Now I just brush it off, hope it wasn’t anything scary, and make sure I’m sleeping with my mouth shut. But I digress…) But it kept coming back and I kept flailing at it like a Honduran in the deep end of a pool. During the 3rd round of our little match I realized that the only light source in the room was coming from my headlamp. Oh yeah. So I took it off and shined it about 2 inches from my book. Of course, the bug immediately jumped onto my book and I smooshed it between pages 134-135 of Don Delillo’s “White Noise” right after Babette lied about taking Dylar and said it was a Life Savers. Good book.

So this has been a fun week thus far. I am writing early this week because it has been eventful and it gives me an excuse to go use the Internet. First of all, it has maintained a healthy 40+ degrees Celsius this week. And thanks to Wendell’s handy little “Your body temperature is about 37 degrees” tip, I now know that it has been roughly 145 degrees here this week. Thanks Wendell. I used to live in ignorance, but now I actually KNOW I am freekin’ miserable. Don’t forget that I still have access to your class. I can go and turn all of your lectures into footage from Monty Python skits. I am not above this…. (Just kidding Wendell, I still want to be your grad student, I know you don’t have a lot of funding so just think how cheap it will be to have a student who can do topo surveys with sticks, abney levels, and a compass. I’ll be like the Crocodile Dundee of the Agro department)

 Ctrl G…. do your magic Larry…

Anyway, the point of that rant is that I can’t sleep at night anymore. Could somebody please send me an air conditioner in a padded envelope? I swear it can totally fit…. I generally fall asleep around 9 and wake up at 11. Then I peel myself off of the top of my sheet and wander around the yard in a general malaise. Eventually I end up at the refrigerator and stand there until I locate some juice. I don’t know why juice. But for some reason it tricks me into sleeping for about another hour or two. Then I wake up and cry a little inside. Then I check my phone to see if anybody called (why? Why the hell not? What else do you do in 179 degree weather at 2 in the morning?) Eventually I give up and listen to my iPod until I fall asleep again. Then Yadira and Suwanee (the workers) get up at 5 and start cleaning while the radio is blaring full tilt. Then I put my pillow on my head, groan a bit, and fall back asleep until 6:29 when I invariably wake up 1 minute before my alarm and peel the sweaty pillow off of my head. Then I stumble outside and almost always say “Good morning, I mean, Buenos noches, no, I mean hasta mañana, no…” and my host mom just laughs and says “Buenos dias, Rebecca!”

Oh, I just re-read that paragraph and it occurs to me that wandering around the yard and ending up at the refrigerator may seem odd. This is because the bedrooms are detached from the house and the kitchen is across the yard from my room.

 So we have been giving lectures in the school this week on not throwing garbage in the streets. I think I am the only person who is never concerned about doing these lectures. Apparently I’m just as imposing of a teacher in Spanish as in English. The only difference is that when instead of saying things like

“Let’s see who can get to their chairs the quietest. The boys or the girls. Ready? Go!”

I say something along the lines of

“I see who will got to a chair the most quietly. Them boys or them girls. Ready? I go.”

But for some reason they seem to understand me. That and I have to rely on my “teacher look” more because I forget how to say things like “Jose, don’t punch your neighbor” or “That pen doesn’t belong in your nose, Juan” in Spanish during the moment. Instead I just give the teacher look like they have clearly lost their minds. Still works. Apparently teacher looks are international. Music, math, and teacher looks. Who knew?

There is an ant that gets water with me every morning. He hangs off the end of the water spicket and drinks while I fill up my bottle. He never bites me. I call him Sven. True story.

We went to do a GPS survey this week at a farm that belongs to my host-brother-in-law’s brother. He has a farm that produces the melty cheese and he has really protected his watershed really well, rotates crops and animals, doesn’t slash and burn, cuts trees only as needed and only cuts rapid-growth trees, and keeps the cattle out of the water source. It’s pretty awesome. Anyway, so the idea was to walk the watershed line and take GPS points so we could map it. So we climbed this rather imposing mountain to get to the top of the watershed. It was soooooo awesome. I fell like 8 times, slid about 20 feet on my ass, one guy fell and jacked up his shoulder, and I am covered in scrapes and bruises. I would totally go again. There was zero trail and we basically just climbed up rocks and crawled under brush, and the whole nine yards. So awesome. I love Peace Corps.

Today we started making stoves out of dirt and cow shit. They are stoves that use less wood than the traditional stoves and also allow for an oven to be part of the stove. It’s ridiculously easy to build these things and they are relatively cheap. I think the total cost is around 650 lempira which is about $32. Trouble is that is still really expensive for most people here. The people we built the stove for were really really poor. Their walls were glorified sticks, they had dirt floors, clearly were seriously in poverty. It made me really sad but I was glad we could at least do that for them. It was an older couple about 70’s and their sister who was in her 80s. It felt really good to build the stove for them.

Anyway, so enough feel-good-news. Let’s get back to talking about playing with shit. We had to beat the shit out of the shit so that it was pliable enough to mix with dirt. We actually didn’t have any dirt with us, so we broke up the nicely swept dirt yard (no joke) into chunks of clay and then jumped up and down on the chunks to make dirt. Then we mixed the two together with water to make shit-dirt. Some people call this mortar. I think shit-dirt is more fun and apt. Then we used that to pave the bricks together (like Adobe houses). Unfortunately, we quickly learned that the best way to pave the shit-dirt is with your hands. So I had my hands all up in that shit today. It was kind of like chocolate, but not delicious. Tomorrow we are going to go back and finish the stove. I am taking great care to not bite my fingernails. Otherwise I may end up feeling like shit myself…

So now I have a rad skill that I can totally use in the event of an apocalypse. My plan is to build a shit-dirt oven and let people use it in exchange for some of their food. I think this is a good plan.

Well, I have written a ton. Larry is tired of guarding my document so I am going to go to bed. Which means I’m going to go lay in my bed and sweat.

I miss you all! PS A couple of people have asked for my address. I can still get mail here where I am for another 4 weeks, I believe. It usually takes about 3-4 weeks so if you want to send me a package do it quickly! Otherwise you will have to wait until I get my site information. Although I’m positive PC will hold it for me until I can get it.

Here is the info:

Rebecca Williams

 PCT Voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz

Apartado Postal 3158

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

America Central

Turns out that we can indeed get boxes, but we have to pay for their storage costs at the Post Office. And the fee is in Lempira, not in dollars. So it’s not so bad to send me a package after all. If the urge strikes to send me things in a package consider (in no particular order):

• Peanut Butter
• Cheese
• Air Conditioner
• All 5 Harry Potter movies on a Flash Drive •
• Natalie Portman 
•  Music on a flash drive (especially Tegan and Sarah “So Jealous” which somehow is not on my iPod…)
• Hiking Socks
• Chocolate (M&M’s and Dove don’t melt….)
• Books
• T-shirts 
•  Dr Brommers Magic Soap
• My Converse from my brothers attic
• Gum
• Pictures
• GRE Math and Linguistics practice books
• A million Lempira (see, I’m not being greedy. I asked for Lemps)
• A flash drive. Any size will do. I don’t have a backup hard drive.

ADENDUM

So FYI it is 11:30 at night and I have already been through the first part of my nightly non-sleeping fiasco. I have already checked my phone (nobody called), wandered in the yard, got some juice, returned, and shed my clothing (other than the bug-barrier underwear). I am really pissed. It’s hot and I can’t sleep yet again. Anybody out there have a trick for sleeping in the heat? It makes me grouchy because I really want to sleep. I love and cherish sleep, in fact. But here I am… awake… and once I wake up and can’t get back to sleep my mind won’t stop working. I just keep thinking and thinking and thinking. Argh. I guess I shall move on to part deux. I’m going to go get some more juice or some water and then I’m going to listen to Carly Comando on my iPod until I fall back asleep. This is totally karma for something. I haven’t figured out what yet… Maybe I did an Office Space on an air conditioning unit in a former life or something. Good news is that thanks to the anti-malarial pills I may very well have a dream about a giant talking red schwin-line stapler that may indeed be able to tell me if this is indeed the issue behind this bad karma… If only I could fall asleep….