(Almost) Two Years in the Peace Corps in Review

Here I am with my host family celebrating Christmas Eve.
Can you spot the gringo?

Hoping that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Hanukka. I was lucky enough to be invited to spend Christmas Eve with my host family, a silly and fun adventure in and of itself. My main goal nowadays is to enjoy the last few moments here in my community, amongst my friends and work partners.

I dare say that now that we are approaching the arrival of a new year, it is an appropriate moment to reflect on one's life. So that's what this post is all about.

Some of my favorite magazine editions are Time’s “Year in Review.” It has been a positive experience, amidst the current dramatic turmoil of PC-Honduras, to do something similar and try to recap the past 22 months I have spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer in this fascinating, generous country:

Work Related

Book your trip now!

Classes taught: 8

Manuals written: 3

Videos made: 1

Volunteer events hosted in my site: 2

Tourists who have

visited my community: 300

Kilometers of new trail built:  5

Gain in profit at my coffee co-op from 2010-2011: L2,000,000 ($100,000)

Cultural/Honduras specific    

 

Heading to my bathroom...

1: spider larger than a tennis ball found in my house

1500-1600 : cups of coffee drunk

4 : buckets of coffee picked

1:  number of times I have been shocked by faulty electric installations

1/4 : bowls of traditional tripe soup successfully/politely downed

Personal Time

Books read: 35... top five:                        

1. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
2. The Sex Lives of Cannibals (Maarten Troost)
3. The Gone Away World (Nick Harkaway)
4. American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
5. The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)

Movies watched: 185 ... top five:

1. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
2. Death Proof (2007)
3. Sin Nombre (2009)
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)    

                                                     
                                               Other

Quetzal.

    Number of months without a personal computer: 7.5

    Apx number of hours of television watched: 25
 
    New countries visited: 2     (El Salvador, Panamá)

    Hikes in the cloud forest: 15

    Quetzals seen: 7

    Shots of tequila taken / shots of tequila regretted: 5/5

    Pictures taken: 2279

    Illegitimate children: 0

Things I will miss…

                    Most

Plato típico = Standard fare

The natural beauty of the Santa Barbara Mountain

All things coffee

My friends and work partners, fellow PCVs

The Honduran plato tipico

The exercise I get on a daily basis

The quiet evenings

Getting piropo-ed (I don’t care if it was by 9^th graders)

Gallina = culprit 1

                    Least

The unease of travelling

Risks of being a gringo here in general

Milk products of Honduras

Gallinas  (chickens) and cohetes (firecrackers)

Cohetes = culprit 2

Riding buses in general

Having no cell phone coverage and being the last to hear about important news

The 60 year old female mayor of Santa Barbara winking at me and squeezing my elbow during meetings

Things I missed from the US… 

Most

Dr. Pepper

Dishwashers

Trash management

Being up to date on news and major events

Driving

Current movies

Ubiquitous Internet

Dave Letterman

Being paid in dollars

The comfort of public security

Being within my native culture

(Friends, family)

Least

"I make America look good."

The fast pace and pressure/stress connected with trying to become a successful adult in the United States

Facebook

Expensive consumer goods

Partisan politics

The economic crisis and not having a job

American television

Donald Trump

Will see everyone back home quite soon. Happy New Year's from San Luis Planes!

Recent smells on the bus

Here is a list of smells that I have had opportunity to experience on the bus from my town to the city of Santa Bárbara:
1. rotting cabbage
2. old man refried-bean farts
3. fermenting coffee beans
4. baby
5. vomit
6. cologne on any male adolescent on board, always overdone just a bit
7. the ubiquitous body odor of people from the campo
8. feet
9. manure

Honduran food, make up your mind

It’s kind of crazy how different the food is here in Honduras from that of their close-by neighbors to the north, Mexico. I’d say we’re all pretty familiar with Mexican food with its spiciness and flavorfulness: salsa, colorful varities of beans, green chile sauce, mole, lime-marinated carne asada etc etc. I like Mexican food a lot.

And personally, I’ve grown to like Honduran food too. But let’s be honest. It’s not as exciting or distinctively zesty as Mexican food is. Some people may even go as far as to call it ‘bland.’ We’re talking generic brown beans, rice, plantains and scrambled eggs as the standard fare. It gets the job done but it seems to lack character or imagination. The beans are the highlight of the meal, if that tells you anything (In fact, one of the biggest Honduran films of the past decade is called "Amor y Frijoles," which means love and beans... see the screenshot).

Hondurans love their food though, and simply have no interest in trying much else. And for them, spicy food is a no-no. But then there are a couple irregularities in this bland agreement that Hondurans have made with their food that have shocked me:

First of all, for a people who don’t generally like strong flavors in their food, they LOAD TO THE MAX their coffee with sugar. And I’m talking practically a 1:1 ratio coffee to sugar. 2 cups coffee, 2 cups sugar. When I visit my neighbors I can feel my teeth start to rot out of my mouth with every sip, as I secretly wince to myself trying not to be impolite. Sure lots of people in the States find black coffee a bit too bitter for their liking, but this is taking it to another extreme. Some of my townsfolk here would probably rather just drink plain sugar itself and leave the coffee out if they could.

So their behavior with coffee would lead one to believe that Hondurans are generally quite opposed to bitterness. In fact, it would seem that they go out of their way to ensure that there is no trace left of the culprit’s original flavor. But that assumption is, in fact, incorrect on the whole. The second shocking irregularity to the bland food premise is their surprising love for superbly bitter food.

At the end of the dry season, people in Honduras excitedly harvest flor de izote, a white flower that grows at the tops of spiky palm shrubs. It’s a pretty flower, kind of rounded and curvy, bunching together into grape-like clusters. But if you decide to sauté it up with onion then scramble in an egg, which is the popular way to consume the flor de izote here, you will instantly realize that your mouth begins to shrivel, never having tasted anything as bitter in your life. Taste buds die one by one and all the moisture in your mouth is consumed by some instinctive emergency reaction. Forget trying to taste anything else for the entire meal. But, from what I can tell, Hondurans are connoisseurs and relish in this flower’s intense bitterness.

Then there’s the pacaya, a medium-sized stalk that grows in the wild, that is scorched over a flame for about 15-20 minutes then peeled. Inside you eat the white and scalding hot membrane plain or mixed into scrambled eggs like the flor de izote. And it offers about the same ultimate effect: mind-blowing and incongruous bitterness.

So I guess I am left a bit confused about how to define Honduran food. Blandish, cavity-inducingly sweet, or freakishly out-of-control bitterness.