Life Lately

We'll we've hit the 2 week mark....but not without our share of ups and downs!

It seems as though our group can’t go anywhere without something going wrong. First there was the teargas incident. And take this past weekend, for example. As a group we traveled to Cusuna, a small village of native people (Garífuna) who live on the north coast. We made the 14+ hour journey in a school bus, which is the longest I have ever been in a school bus at one time. It was impossible to sleep because it was 1) HOT!!! 2) Bumpy—we drove on many dirt roads 3) Loud—some people don’t know how to be quiet! I thought the bus ride would be the worst part of the trip, but I was wrong.

We spent a lot of time with the native people, and our interactions were slightly comical because Spanish was everyone’s second language, so we often had a hard time understanding each other. We spent the first day swimming and hanging out at the beach with the Garífuna people and saw a performance of some traditional dances. We enjoyed some home cooked, traditional Honduran food, and even attended a church service at a local church. I think this is when things started to go downhill. We spent all of our time outside, walking around. We weren’t drinking enough water and people started to get sick. Some were dizzy, some almost passed out, and some threw up. All in all, we probably had 5 or 6 people sick while we were in Cusuna. Even more people got sick on the way home, and my friend Lynelle went to the hospital this morning. (She’s okay now, but she was running a high fever). The sickness on the trip was a combination of different things—the heat and humidity, not drinking/eating frequently enough, exhaustion, bus-sickness, etc—but it made the trip somewhat stressful at times.

Oh, and my friend Lisa got locked in the bathroom at the gas station on the drive home! She literally couldn’t get out…not even through the window, so some guys had to break off the door knob. She was stuck in the bathroom for half an hour!

On a lighter note, there have been many laughs in the past 2 weeks. The funniest things have been language issues, where people use the wrong word and totally change the meaning of what they are trying to say. My friend Tessa and I were eating lunch, and she wanted a napkin, but she used the word “cerveza” instead of “servielleta.” She told me she wanted a beer!

Another day I was talking with my brother and grandma about animal noises because apparently animals here make different noises than in the US. For example, dogs say, “Wow-wow” instead of “Woof-woof” so I asked my brother what a chicken says. I was taken aback when he simply said, “Galletas don’t talk” because chickens do talk! Then I realized that I had said “galletas” instead of “gallinas.” My brother was right…cookies don’t talk!

The good still outweighs the bad, and I am having a fantastic time. I absolutely love my family, and had a heart-to-heart with my grandma about how I am one of her granddaughters. There are several things that I miss about home (carpet, being able to talk around with my shoes off, warm(ish) water, mashed potatoes, being able to walk down the street and not have men “bark” at me) but I am adjusting well to life here. It’s exciting, challenging, sometimes scary, sometimes crazy, but I love every minute!

For those of you who want it, my address here is:

Heather Loock

Apdo 30676

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Central America

AND my cell number is: 011-504-9744-3594