A Frustrating Day in the Life

8am: arrive at municipality office expecting the library committee to be there to help me with cataloging books. Nobody is there. The librarian assumed I’d remind everybody the day before; however, the day before I was in the next town over buying HER birthday cake. I suggest she come with me to the committee members’ houses to invite them. She declines. I get mad.

8:15: arrive at committee member’s house, which is literally 20 steps away from the municipality. He says he will do todo lo posible (everything possible) to help out. This, in Honduran speak, means he will not come. I get mad again.

8:30: Antonio, a guy with whom I worked on a proposal, asks me to print out the proposal to send to an NGO. I spend 78 lempiras (almost 4 bucks) of my own money printing it out, and bring it right over.

9:00: Antonio comes back to me and tells me to print it out again, it was missing something. We’d gone over this proposal the night before and he’d said nothing; now he wants me to change a part and print it all over again. I tell him to do it himself. Again, I’m a bit mad.

12:00 Get home to make lunch, and there’s no water. Hmm.

12:30 While working in the living room with the TV on, hordes of children peek through my windows to see all the stuff in my room. I yell “BOO!!” and scare them away

1:15 My neighbor strolls onto my front porch and starts ripping out cilantro from my flower bed. I yell “go right ahead!!” and she gets embarrassed and walks away. Sure she’s too embarrassed to ask me, but she has no pena about helping herself and ripping out all the cilantro I have. Ahhhhhh!!!!!

1:25 A woman peeks through my window at the TV set and yells “Having fun, aren’t you?” I scream. She wanders over to the front porch and stares at the TV. I wonder what to do. I try to talk to her but she’s fixated on the TV. I turn off the TV. She goes away. I wonder why I agreed to live here.

2:00 I make Irish bread with my friend at the neighbor’s house. We chat in the backyard amid a menagerie of barnyard animals.

4:00 arrive back at the house and there are literally 12 children on my porch waiting for me. They want to play Monopoly and draw and possibly eat all my food and drink all my juice. I tell them “not today, kids.” They leave.
4:25 I work on library stuff at my house. I look out the window and there’s a library committee member washing his car. I quietly grumble to myself.

5:00 I visit the old host family. The old host mom feeds me coffee and tamales and puts me to work in the pulpería downstairs. I sell people beans and corn and hot dogs but I don’t know any of the prices. People are amused.

6:00 I get home and go outside to take my clothes from the line, and see a mess of broken plastic shards all over the lawn. It seems the neighbors cleaned house, by throwing all their junk over the wall into my yard. I guess they thought I wouldn’t mind??

6:30 I hear the soft ping of rocks thrown at my window. I open the curtain and there’s a little boy just standing there, assuming I wasn’t home (even though the lights were all on. Idiot!) He gets embarrassed and says “Excuse me” and runs away.

6:45 my neighbor comes to visit. I tell her all about my ridiculous day. She laughs and laughs.

My dog Tigra

I have a new friend, in the form of a mangy dog named Tigra. Tigra is the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen in my life, and she barks incessantly with this high-pitched, ear-splitting ROWROWROWROWROWROWROW which sometimes drives me up the wall. I like her though, mostly because she protects me from the bolos that stagger around my house from the nearby cantina. She also barks whenever a bratty kid tries to set off rockets outside my window. She even barks if the neighbor’s chickens try to eat my cilantro. She sleeps (and scratches herself for hours on end) on my front porch and keeps other dogs away. Even when she’s in heat she makes sure to do her thing with the boy dogs away from my house. She’s a class act, that Tigra… sometimes annoying, and ugly as sin, but a class act all the way.

General Update

Life in San José has been a bit busier for me this past week, for a very exciting reason. I went last week to Tegucigalpa with the municipal librarian for a training with the National Library Network. The Network helps various public libraries across Honduras with book donations, trainings and technical support. I got in touch with them back in September, and we arranged for the two of us to go to their office for a two-day training on how to run a library. When we got there we expected just that, a mere training... when in fact we got a training along with 135 brand-new books for our library. Considering our library originally consisted of about 100 very old books, half of which were bad novels in English from the 70s, this donation was huge for our library. We got back to San José excited and newly optimistic about the future of our little municipal library.

Since then, we´ve been working like crazy to get the books registered, cataloged and classified before being placed on the shelves. Now, back at the GU Library where I worked freshman year, everything was computerized with a digital card catalog and registry. However, you can imagine that in little San José, this is just not possible. So everything is by hand: writing inventory, stamping the books, making the cards from construction paper, writing out cards for all 262 books, 4 cards per book (that´s 1050 cards!!!), classifying each one and THEN organizing them on the shelf. In the end I know it will all be worth it, but it is definitely alot of work for the two of us. We will try enlisting the help of our library committee, who claim they want to help. We´ll see if they actually come by to do the menial work of cutting cards and taping codes on books for hours on end.

This has been the most exciting event for us all month, which I´m especially happy about since many of my other projects seem to be stalling or dying on the vine: school is out until February, so I won´t be working with them til next year, the women´s trash cooperative never invites me to meetings anymore, and the tourist group has delayed meeting up for over a month. Whatever.

Another neat event in San José occurred on Monday, when I saw a group of AMERICANS right in the middle of town, speaking my language and looking very tall and American. Normally I would not be excited to see fellow Americans... maybe it´s just for the sheer number of U.S. tourists that travel to other countries, but I just don´t feel an urge to talk to an American when I see one overseas. HOWEVER if i see one in the 1,200-person town of San José de Comayagua, I get VERY excited! So I went straight over to their van and introduced myself... it turned out they were from the army/air force base, and wanted to spend their Veterans Day holiday checking out the caves in San José. Amazing! They ended up staying there all day despite the rain and mud, and said they´d be sure to tell their friends. Friends!! More tourists!! I was pretty thrilled... even if the youth tourist group can´t get their act together, the tourists still come.

Other than that life is the same... I´ll be making Irish bread and bringing it to my friend´s site in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving this year. Apparently her site sells Butterball turkeys, yes Butterball turkeys, so therefore Thanksgiving must be held there.

More updates to come.