Sarah in Honduras: October 2007

I´ve finally settled in to my permanent home here in Tocoa, Colon (for some reason, every time I tell a Honduran I live in Tocoa, they say oh, Tocoa, Colon, as if there were another somewhere in Honduras). I really like my host family. I have a host sister who´s my age, Nancy, who is in college 2 hours away but comes home for the weekends, an older sister, Cynthia, with the cutest two-year-old you´ve ever seen, a 15-year-old brother, Kevin (who´s actually a cousin), and an 11-year-old sister, Carol. It´s strange to go from being an only child in a fairly quiet household to one of 6. Every morning, I wake up at 5:30 AM to the sounds of the radio and the whole family sweeping the house and doing laundry. Even though I don´t work until 12 noon, the productivity is so contagious that I feel I must get up and make breakfast for the family or sweep my room too. My host mom works as a nurse in a town an hour away, but she gets up at the crack of dawn to cook lunch for the family before she leaves. My host-dad is a high school English teacher. School is different here in that there are two shifts with totally different teachers and students, one from 7AM to 12PM and one from 12:30ish to 5:30. Cynthia works in the morning, and the kids and I watch her daughter, Isieny. Then she returns and we go to school. School is also a different experience in itself. One might describe it as a little more unstructured than in the states. There are a lot of holidays, and you can´t be certain when they are, and when teachers will actually be teacher. I am currently working with Maria, a 18-year-old volunteer from Ohio, with 20 or so students as the math/reading specialist and Special Ed. teacher. Yeah, I´m a little underqualified...Last week, I also served as a substitute fourth grade teacher for an afternoon with no plans left for me. It´s definitely been a learning experience so far. These next few weeks I´m working on making and giving evaluations for each student to prove to the parents that their children are learning English. I´ll also be figuring out how many textbooks are needed for next year and getting those ordered sometime in the next few months. I have moments when I just feel like things are so different here (such as when I attempt to cook for the family) and sometimes I feel like there are very few differences at all. It just depends on the day and the hour. Before I get off the computer, I will attempt to describe my cooking struggles. My host-mom has been away for the last two weeks, and it has been up to me and my older sister to cook for the family. I know very few recipes by heart, but I have attempted to make chili, fish tacos, flank steak and onions, pasta dishes, and banana bread. There are very few American ingredients that can be found at the supermarkets, so when asked to cook American food I struggle. I actually hand breaded and fried fish fillets for my fish tacos (instead of the fish sticks I rely on in the US), bought the only thing I could find labeled beef in the freezer for my flank steak, and found the only spicy sauce in the house to create my chili. Cheddar cheese (or really any cheese other than the Honduran mix between feta and mozzerella that is used for everything), mushrooms, sweet potatoes, and peanut butter have proved impossible to find in Tocoa. It is quite humbling to find that while I rely on a cookbook, measuring cups, and a variety of ingredients that can be purchased at King Soopers, my 15-year-old Honduran brother can make a better pancake than me from scratch.

My host sister, Carol, at the Independence Day parade