Post 2

I have been holding off on my second post, hoping to get the camera situation worked out; but I think I had better not wait any longer.

Lots to catch you all up on . . .

The camp was a lot of fun . . . I traveled with Sr. Roselba and about ten girls by bus from Santa Rosa to San Pedro Sula, to Tegucigalpa, and finally to a cute little town up in the mountains called Ojohona – in total, it took about ten hours. The weekend was filled with a lot of singing, dancing, skits, games, talks by the sisters, and prayer . . . it brought back a lot of memories from the Challenge and MI camps/retreats I attended when I was younger. It was fun to see how, apart from the obvious cultural and language differences, these girls were so similar to ones I might meet at a Catholic camp in the US. You had all the same camper personalities/characters (the loud enthusiastic girls, the good girls, the 'cool girls', the quiet girls . . .), and even some of the songs were recognizable – different words, but definitely Spanish versions of “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?”, “Old McDonald”, “Father Abraham”/“The Button Factory”, etc.

I have now had two “normal weeks” at the school. I'm sort of, somewhat getting the hang of the routine, despite language issues. I've started helping Sr. Dorita sell snacks during the girls' recreation time between classes. Imagine that you're standing behind a counter; you have 30 or 40 school girls crowded around, many of them yelling to try to get your attention; the money is new to you; the snacks are new to you; the prices mostly aren't written anywhere (I fixed that this week); and it's all in a language you hardly understand. Yeah, it's slightly insane, but kind of amusing. Luckily, I don't have to do it on my own, and mostly the girls find it funny when I have to point to five different things before figuring out exactly what they want.

In celebration of Honduran Independence, many of the girls participated in a Honduran folk dance presentation/competition at the school this Friday.

My Spanish has been slowly, slowly getting better. Speaking is still very hard for me, but I can tell that I'm understanding a bit more than I did a couple weeks ago. As I told my family, the trouble is, now people seem to think I understand enough to take on responsibilities . . . and, well, that doesn't always work out so well. Several of the girls have been really sick, and I've spent quite a number of hours sitting in a clinic this week. One of the girls in particular has been very sick with what we are guessing is Dengue, and so her mom came to pick her up this week. Unfortunately, the American didn't realize that a)the girl wasn't supposed to go out due to her fever, and b)didn't know which sister was supposed to give permission to leave the school. So, the mom showed up at the school to pick up her sick daughter, and the daughter couldn't be found because she was at the clinic with me waiting for the results of her blood tests. Yeah, that was embarrassing. I'm very grateful that the mother was so sweet and understanding.

Speaking of not understanding things . . . The room where I am staying has now flood about a dozen times. It seems that it often floods when I use the shower. The maintenance man has looked at it three or four times, and attempted to explain something to me, but his accent is so thick that I have a really hard time understanding much of anything he says. The one thing I have understood is that if I run the bathroom faucet at the same time as the shower, it often doesn't flood. I really am not sure how that works . . .

This last Thursday afternoon was exciting (and, in hindsight, pretty amusing). School had been out for an hour or so, and I was just helping the boarding girls get started on their chores. All of the sudden, one of the sisters, trailed by a group of men carrying some sort of equipment, walked up to us and told the girls that they needed to drop what they were doing and go to the patio. I was pretty confused for a few minutes, until I caught on that they were fumigating the buildings for bugs . . . right now. It was slightly chaotic. Girls were rushing around trying to grab homework, going “Listen! They're coming! They're coming!” By the time we got most of the people to leave the building for the part of campus across the street, smoke was billowing out of rooms. Luckily, someone had the foresight to grab the cat. If that wasn't exciting enough, we had to return to the main building after 45 minutes or so because they needed to fumigate the second building as well. I spent the afternoon trying not to freak out too much about girls breathing in toxic fumes. Honestly, most of them stayed in the patio where there was at least semi-fresh air, and everyone seems fine. I have seen more dead or dying cockroaches in these last couple of days than I think I have seen in my entire life up to this point (and I lived in Old Mill for two years, so that's saying something). Language/cultural immersion has definitely taught me the importance of being flexible in adapting to the random situations that arise in the present moment=)