Here I Am ....

I have been in Nueva Ocotepeque for about 20 hours now ... In some ways it´s just what I anticipated, and in others I guess it´s quite different. I guess I´ll just describe it all below, in what I think will be a pretty long entry, so get ready!!

Leaving New York
My sister Mindy came up for the weekend, thank goodness. After she and I cleared out my apartment and brought a carfull of stuff into the city to donate, we had a big dinner with my grandparents. We had debated doing a last big weekend in New York, trying to see a show and cross everything off my list, but in the end we were just tired. On Saturday night we played cards and were in bed at 9pm!! On Monday morning, when we left for the airport, my landlord and his wife work up to say goodbye, and she was so sweet and crying. I was strong tho.

Getting Here
My flight out was at 915am Monday, and I thought getting there at 7am would be plenty of time, but I ended up being close to last in the huge line that took me 2 hours to get through! I technically missed my plane, but what they do is schedule 2 flights for the same time, and then mix up the people so that one plane fills up immediately and leaves, while the other one waits for a while for the stragglers. In line I met some nice gringos, one of whom works at a bar in Antigua so perhaps I´ll see him again. Once I got through (with, by the way, my huge backpack weighing in at 50lbs, my day pack, my Thai shoulder bag, and a ratty Board of Ed tote bag) I ran through the airport to get to the plane, but of course we waited at the gate a while longer. On the plane, I napped through lunch, and when I asked the stewardess for a meal she said no! I was sad and hungry, but the woman behind me heard me asking and offered me her muffin :) When I got to San Salvador, Jonno, the Australian volunteer met me at the airport with a little ´Welcome Lori´ sign, and I felt bad b/c the plane was over an hour late. The school director´s brother-in-law drove us back to Honduras, about 2 hours, including a stop at Pizza Hut - my first meal!!

The Town
It´s beautiful here, lots of farms and as we drove closer to the El Salvador-Honduras border, more and more mountains. It was stifling hot in San Salvador, and it´s still hot today. But it´s the middle of the rainy season here, so that´s pretty unusual. Apparently there´s a week-long break in the rainy season, they call it veranito, the little summer, where it´s sunny and not rainy every day, and I have fortunately arrived in the middle of that. Otherwise, they say I can expect it to rain every day around 3pm and not stop all night, through til about November :( This internet cafe is literally 4 doors down from me, and it´ll cost $1 an hour, so this will probably be a daily stop (so keep those emails coming). Roads are mostly paved, and the town of 10,000 is fairly large. There is a supermarket and little corner stores - last night I bought a Gatorade - and there´s a bank too. Oh, and a post office ... To send mail to me, here´s all you need to do:

Lori Sandler, Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras

and it´ll get to me, apparently in 3 or 4 weeks. You may as well write ¨gringa¨ Oh, and tonight they´re taking me to the gym, located in some woman´s attic but with real machines and weights and things. There seems to be a pattern of killing time in the afternoon from 2-6, working out at night around 6ish, then eating and showering, then hanging out for a bit.

The House
I don´t know what I was expecting from the house, but I certainly wasn´t expecting this. The houses in the town seem to be all connected, concrete blocks w- shared walls. There are breaks in the roofs, making little alleys, but inside the houses! It´s kind of cool, the hallway inside gets light and air (and probably rain, actually). There´s a big living room with a bunch of chairs and sofas, then the 3 bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The bathroom situation is where I feel a little misled. We do have running water, in that every few days we can fill up a big sink in the back of the house. But even though the bathrooms have shower equipment, there is no running water there. Or in the toilets. We fill up a bucket from the big sink and then, after doing our business, toss the water in the toilet to make it flush. I am not a fan of this. For showers, we have to go to Carol´s house, so we take turns showering there at night. We have to turn on a pump out in her backyard to turn on the water, and last night Jonno went to show me how to do that, out in the dirt with chickens etc., and I got so scared that that was also the shower!! But fortunately it´s not, and the shower has hot water, so I guess I´ll be ok. My room is super-tiny, but when Cathy the other other volunteer leaves on Thursday I can switch to her room which is a bit nicer.

The People
I live with Jonno, a former high school history teacher and former vegetarian from Australia, and Catharyn, who´s about to enter grad school in psychology and is from Arizona. The kids get a big kick out of Arizona, apparently, because it sounds like ´nariz sona´ which means to blow your nose. Nearby live Mark, Paul and Sim who are Peace Corps volunters, and at various times over the past day they´ve all come by our house just to hang out. Someone has a computer on which we can play dvds, and last night when I showed them what I brought I think they approved. There will be a big going away party for Cathy tomorrow, a dispedida, with all the teachers and students, and then Sim is apparently going to cook us curry at his place after that. They all seem very nice and it´s good to have friends around. Kelly comes in two weeks and Jonno leaves mid-September. They seem to travel quite a bit, to El Salvador and to Guatemala. There´s a city nearby that has many luxuries like a movie theater -- one of the guys saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith over the weekend, and there are dvd bootlegs of Herbie Fully Loaded on the street, so it looks like I´ll be able to keep up with pop culture pretty well.

The School
It´s adorable and just a few blocks from the house. The plan is for me to observe Cathy for the next few days and then just take over her classes. This might be tough, because her schedule is strangely hard. The school vaguely runs in 45-minute periods, and the students have 8 periods a day: social studies, geography, math, science in Spanish with the local teachers, and Reading, Grammar, Phonics and Spelling with us volunteers. I´ll start at 8am, teach Reading and Phonics to about 12 2nd graders. They have a textbook with a story, so the week revolves around that story, and Cathy has a whole system of vocabulary and homework that I´ll stick with. Then there´s recess where everyone just runs around - the school is open-air with a little courtyard in the center. Then Reading and Phonics to the 4 3rd graders, who don´t speak very much English, then Grammar for 4 4th graders, some of whom have lived in the States and have great conversational skill. Then another brief recess and a break for me, then Reading for 10 5th graders, and the day ends at 1pm. I brought a book home today to look at ... it seems that the first couple days of the week are about the story, then for a couple days we have some freedom to do things based on the story (ex. Cathy created an internet art project for the 5th graders b/c their story was about Van Gogh). On Friday is Hora Civica, for which the kids work to prepare songs or skits all week long. The 4th graders have done Oasis´ Wonderwall and the Beatles´ Baby You Can Drive My Car, so it seems I´ll have a lot of leeway with that!! The kids were cute and generally well behaved, and I got two cards that said I love you already!

Speaking Spanish
is really really hard. Even tho in my mind I have some things to say, sometimes I get stuck. And I can´t really understand what anyone says here -- their Spanish is very soft and monotone. I´m used to Dominican or Puerto Rican or even Costa Rican Spanish which is much louder and more expressive, and it makes it really hard. So far this is one of my least favorite parts, actually, because at the store or wherever I just can´t understand anybody. I´m sure that´ll change as I get used to it, but for now it´s really frustrating.

That´s all I can think of ... the food´s pretty bad but for free I´ll take it. The guys here talk fondly of the pizza and chocolate cake that they get when the travel on the weekends, and I suppose I too will someday look forward to a big lunch at Pizza Hut. It´s hard to believe I´ve only been here a day, but I also need to get my bearings quickly b/c when Jonno leaves next month I´ll suddenly be the expert. For now I´m having fun and looking forward to figuring it all out.