Morning

I woke up this morning in my bottom bunk to the sound of the rooster(s) crowing. They are really pushy things that make a lot of noise and molest the female chickens. The tin roof has pieces of plastic in the middle to allow light to come through when it pops up. The sun comes up at 5:30, so this is when I get out of bed.

I'm always the first up, I like having first pickings on the road for walking. (Solitude goes a long way for just a moment.) Flaco the mutt awesome dog expecting puppies from his mate/mom - that's how nature goes, I'm learning - followed me and waited while I made a rock path over the creek so I wouldn't get my feet wet.

**Later I stepped in a mud hole by the pila - washing area - and completely mucked up my shoes anyhow.

It's great when you are far enough away to hear nothing but waterfalls and it's not hot enough to start sweating too much. Lots of barbed wire, but lots of green mountains and hills and behind those probably more. And some cows, and a really ugly pig, and some garbage, and some shacks...but I really like it.




Breakfast took an hour and a half to make.

1. Haul in wood and pine needles.
2. Arrange and light with matches in the hole under the flattop stove.
3. Fail and bring in more wood of varying sizes.
4. Ask someone who has been here longer to help.
5. Fill kettle for boiling water for coffee.
6. Assess food availability. It's been 5 days since we've shopped, so we're down to onions, garlic, onions and eggs. Frittata time!
7. Chop with dull knife, wait for oil to slowly heat.
8. Eventually make coffee, eventually eat frittata, eventually eat tortillas that were made in the meantime. And oranges and avocado. It's better than it sounds.

Mid-breakfast we saw Candida, the campus cook, carrying a rooster by its neck and legs, the same jerk that keeps waking me up. Today we eat rooster!

"Podemos mirar, por favor?" Can we watch?

Oh yeah, nothing flavors your own breakfast better than watching your lunch be swiftly put to sleep with a small knife. It wasn't shocking, it wasn't "super" or "delightful" but I've always thought that if I could watch it die, or even help, then I can eat it without guilt because I witnessed the circle of life stand on rooster legs and do what needs to be done.

All this communal pastoral living is really encouraging my hippie "Peace, Love, and Food" ideals.

A Photograph

This is what the city looks like. The cracked windshield is common.

Barbed Wire

Goats seem to be my lot here.

5:30 AM: Yank goats from pen with calculated separation of the scary, horny male from the abundance of females. Wander around hopelessly looking for ropes tied to trees. (No one can remember where those darn things are.) Yank goats to ropes when finally located, abandon to eat whatever.

The waking up early is easy. The bedroom has a skylight and the sun is already peeking at that time, the weather is already warm enough for sandals. It’s not even the goat yanking that is difficult.

What is difficult is the barbed wire.

The barbed wire “crossing” on the way to the waterfall was surprising. First time for everything, might as well learn to carefully squeeze like the rest of the world. The barbed wire at the entrance of the soccer field was shocking. Why in the kj&$*&%jhgksljf didn’t someone build a gate into this square? It seems that it’s just more convenient to flatten oneself into a foot high inverted limbo player. And when we were told the goats had been moved to a better area, after about a mile, we came to barbed wire. This barbed wire was gosh darn ridiculous. It’s not that it might rip your clothing, or pull your hair or whatnot: it is just inconvenient.

I can’t say I’ve ever had to yank goats through barbed wire before (at no expense to them, they are already pros, but incredibly stubborn.) Before living here, that is. But at 5:30 every morning, the goats are reluctantly pulled, sometimes into fields they probably shouldn’t be. It seems that it doesn’t really keep anything in or out anyway; cows and horses stand all over the roads and trails.  

I haven’t been inconveniently barbed yet, which is excellent news, because this means I can explore any part of this backcountry that is somehow left unbothered by the rest of the entire world.

***Chickens do not have barbed wire. However, they do peck at your legs when you bring the feed to the trough and try to hide their eggs. When they are in my way, or if I am irritable, I have been told to grab under the chicken armpits and toss. Oh, life lessons!

The Drive

I used to think it was hilarious to see Taiwanese drivers go the wrong way down the sidewalk as a detour to 7-11;

I used to be enraged watching California drivers weave their angry selves through rush hour traffic;

I used to be judgmental of jalopies in Cuba with missing floorboards;

Yesterday I sat in a giant red van with peeling siding and flashing overhead lights and a cracked windshield and laughed myself into an dumbfounded stupor as I watched a school bus [public bus] plow down a one way [two way] street and swerve gracefully just as it seemed to collect us in its path.

The honks are adorable.

“Honk honk” means I AM GOING TO GOING KEEP DRIVING I DON’T CARE IF YOU ARE STILL DRIVING AND IF YOU DON’T LET ME IN I WILL HIT YOU.

“Honk honk honk” means I AM GOING TO KEEP DRIVING EVEN IF YOU’RE WALKING AND EVEN IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN AND EVEN IF YOU’RE OLD.

If there is no honk, you can generally assume someone is creeping up beside you, creating an improvised lane on the left, on the right – who cares? Sitting at the exhaust filled stoplights, men slide between the “lanes” selling plastic bags of water. Genius, considering it’s warm near the equator. Who knew?

This was in the city, in Tegucigalpa, the capital. (And it wasn’t easy or quick.) Outside the city, up and up a surprisingly well paved highway we saw the city disappear into the valley, surrounded by stack after stack of tin/concrete shacks, favela-esque. We stopped for shopping in the nearest village and I experienced the anxiety of the ditches: a foot wide, two deep, the perfect size for tires to die, flanking both sides of the unpaved street. Who thinks of something so sadistic, or grimy? (They are lined with garbage and green water.)  Then we hit the mountain road.

The mountain road is not a road. It isn’t even really a trail. It is rock that somehow doesn’t have trees on it that somehow leads to villages that no one should really live in because it makes no sense to live somewhere with no road. But there are people, and as we drove we stopped and asked if anyone needed a ride: it’s the neighborly thing to do. (No takers yet.)

This van is a clunker. This is a road that should only be driven by no one. But we did, bumping like a covered wagon for over an hour, sometimes plunging into creeks and small rivers that made me put my head between my legs, imagining when we were going to have to get out and push. The van doesn’t have seatbelts. And the five of us just laughed, not even nervously after the honk honk fiasco, because it worked.

Don’t even ask me yet how any of this works.

Acceptance

I am 25 years old, I've watched a lot of sunsets over different oceans, I've kicked up dust on multi-colored roads and put in over a hundred hours of bum-numbing flight time. 

It could have been a phase, it could have been exploration, it could have been sprinting from home, it could have been curiosity. Whatever the reason, I've had a lot to say about the world, and I thought  now, at an appropriate age, time was ripe for the house-car-dog priorities of an adult. 

I love working hard, and I love reward. I loved stuffing my money belt with colorful bills of inflated foreign currency, flying home, putting it away and saving it for the next big thing. What is the next big thing?

Oh heck, isn't that the question? What's the next little thing? Between you, me, and the tarmac, I didn't think I'd travel much more besides vacation (What's a vacation?) And then something came up quite suddenly, and I had to think, is this appropriate for the post-graduate traveller, or the adult in me?

Art for Humanity is a non-profit in backcountry Honduras that has built a school for young women. It teaches, it farms, it builds, and goodness knows what other little nuggets of karma. It is run by volunteers. The permanent staff don't have an income to speak of, except that all living necessities are provided. It's a hard place to establish a career where you have to border run every three months, just so you can stay a little longer.

I love reward, and I've accepted that this time, money is not the currency. I'm shoving off in less than four weeks to pass three Spring months in Central America, sling around some major español, and hopefully leave with a money belt full of nothing, but a spirit full of superpowers. 

I would love to tell you about it.

And preparation begins...