Barriers

Juanca's birthday! He's so adorable.

Let's see, what have I been up to? I haven't been doing much, just going to school and church on the weekends. This weekend I also went to watch people from my church play futbol and Saturday...what did I even do Saturday? How can I not remember three days ago? I think I'm going senile.

Today AFS called me to ask if I wanted to switch grades or schools because I guess my host mama complained to them because my classes are impossibly hard (programming? calculus? computer repair?!) and I said no, just because I've already been where I am for six weeks and I don't want to start all over again, it's hard enough making friends as it is. I wish I had thought to talk to AFS about it a month ago, but I wasn't even aware that switching schools was an option. I'm really having a hard time seeing how I'm going to get any credit for all these classes I doubt I can pass, even though AFS is doing their best to see that I do, so it's looking like I might be stuck in high school a little longer than planned. Oh well, I guess the important thing is really that I'm making friends and learning spanish.

So about making friends...it's hard. Shocking, right? There are the obvious problems of the language and social barriers, and then there's that underlying barely-tangible cultural barrier. There's a disconnect between the way I think and behave as a result of my culture and the way Hondurans think and behave as a result of their culture, and sometimes that makes it feel impossible to communicate. I feel like there have been some times when I've accidentally offended or snubbed people simply because of a miscommunication. I have to be very conscious of appearing friendly because Hondurans are friendly in ways that Americans are not. For instance, in Honduras, it's impolite to walk past a person, stranger or friend, without saying "hola" or "adios" or "buenos". "Here we at least say Adios, Kaiti!" lectured Nicol when I responded to an "adios" with a smile and a wave. Also, Hondurans are really into cheek kissing-- everyone. Family, friends, strangers, teachers. I love cheek kissing but it's another one of those things that stresses me out because I don't really understand it.

I was warned, before I came here, that Hondurans are a very non-confrontational people. I thought that was a rather bizarre generalization, so I sort of blew it off, but it's true. If people want to say something to you...they don't just say it to you. I've noticed that in general, controversial issues aren't really addressed or discussed openly...people here are very religious, but often more so in appearance than in practice. I'm a very direct and open person, so that's another thing that's hard to get used to.

In some ways, though, Hondurans are less polite than Americans. I noticed that kids at school love to jokingly address each other as "Vo'Imbecil!" ("Yo imbecil?" "No, el otro imbecil!"..."Vo'Imbecil!") and "Maje!" Black kids are nearly always referred to as "Negro!" which sounds horribly offensive to my American ears but it's the norm here. Black kids are also teased about their skin ("Your skin's so dark, your mama must have left you in the oven when you were little!") which is hilarious because often the teasers are every bit as dark as the "black" kids. In fact, often I don't even know someone is "black" until I hear "Hey, Negro!" and see them turn their head. They're all pretty mixed.

People are just referred to by their physical attributes in general...kids with curly hair are called "curly", kids with pale skin are teased for being "gringo", kids with pimples are addressed as "pimples!". I've also heard hey gordo! Which is like, hey fat guy! That would not go down well in America.

Also, every Honduran's favorite English word is "fuck", which is hilariously incongruent with their politeness. Lost at Uno-- fuck! Stubbed my toe-- fuck! Dropped my pencil-- fuck! At school, no less-- I wince every time I hear it. They must not understand its poignancy in the English language. They love the n-word, too, which I can't even type.

Mainly I'm just trying to focus on making friends. I wouldn't have said I'm a shy person a month ago but it's amazing what being completely uprooted and replanted can do for what you think you know about yourself. I'm finding that I really have to take making friends into my own hands, if I sit around waiting for people to talk to me it is absolutely never going to happen. Mostly I find people are intimidated by my presence or just apathetic. Some comments have led me to think that people here are incredibly willing to believe that I consider myself superior to them because I am "gringa", which is of course completely not the case. I guess people are just shy sometimes. They do talk to me on facebook-- I've had a few people message me on facebook telling me I should talk to more people. One guy who was completely unresponsive to my attempts at real life conversation later FBed me to say he was sorry, and that he had been nervous. I said you're nervous, dude? I'm fresh off the plane living in a country full of people I don't know who speak a language I don't speak haha it's fine we'll talk tomorrow :) Haha. I guess highschool's the same everywhere. I've been trying more and more to make extra-extra-effort. I started out with inviting a few girls I eat lunch with over to come over and swim this weekend and I can't wait!

There are a lot of ways in which I really like the cultural differences here.

Hondurans are very friendly and generous. They love to share. Yesterday, for instance, my religion teacher invited me and a few of his other students into his office during recreo just to chat and share a giant omelette he had brought in foil wrap. Often you'll see people splitting tiny meals sixteen ways, pulling candies or cookies or entire plates of chicken fajitas out of their little purses, which I think is pretty sweet. Personal property isn't really a thing here, what you have, you share, even if it's not much.

Hondurans have very strong family values. They prioritize their families and they are always loyal. Divorce rates are very low. University students are likely to live at home with their parents, "on-campus housing" is not a thing. My host mom has a niece who regularly steals money and the most random household items from them-- clothes, sketchbooks, underwear-- haha! yet she is still welcome to stay whenever she wants because she is family. I guess that goes back to the personal property thing, too.

Some Hondurans have pointed out to me that Americans are obsessed with time. "What is it with Americans and lists?" asked Kevin. "You Americans are always making lists." I think Americans make lists because in general they are very goal-oriented and efficient-- Hondurans, not so much. Hondurans take their time doing whatever it is that they are doing, they relax and enjoy life and are often not concerned with huge accomplishments. Kevin and I arrived at the conclusion that sometimes making lists is bad because your goals can get in the way of other things that are more important.

AFS has a motto: "It's not good, it's not bad, it's just different". I'm finding in many ways that is true.

PS. Does anyone know how to disable that tag-autocorrect on blogspot that corrects all your tags to tags you used in former posts? It's making me want to scream.

First day of school!

Today was my first day of school! When I got there I was super nervous. My host mom introduced me to Nicol, a friend of the Ortega's, and she was really nice and she's in my grade so she showed me the way to my first class. I was cheerfully informed that she speaks english, and my only thought was noooooooo! At first Nicol only spoke english to me, but I told her I wanted to speak spanish, so thankfully, she started speaking some spanish. I almost feel weird about asking people who already speak english to speak spanish with me, because their english is usually much better than my spanish, so it takes a lot of patience on their part to try to communicate to me in spanish, but she was pretty cool about it.

Nicol showed me what my schedule would look like and I almost passed out from shock and horror. Everyone told me that school here would be really easy, but I'm thinking they were all wrong. My first class was diseno, or design. It was all a bunch of stuff about "data sources" and "dialog" and "input". The professor dictated the lesson and we all copied it down in our notebooks. Here this is a very typical classroom style because schools don't want to spend a lot of money on textbooks and materials. This is a nightmare for me because auditorily comprehending spanish is twice as difficult as reading it, but I was able to copy everything down with 95 percent accuracy, and then Nicol let me borrow her notes so I could copy the other 5 percent. However, I'll probably be spending a great deal of the afternoon trying to figure out what the heck any of it meant.

Next was Honduran History, but I just doodled because they were doing an exam that I wasn't required to take and then we had programming class. Programming class. I copied down everything on the board, but obviously, I don't have one iota of background knowledge about programming, let alone programming in spanish. The professor walked up to me and asked if I knew anything about programming. Nothing? Really? And then he stood there for a minute thinking, and then he gave me a look that basically said "you're screwed", turned to Nicol, and said, "You teach her". Nicol laughed and did a faceplant on her desk, and then turned around.
"You don't know anything about programming?"
"Uh, no."
"Nothing? Really? Uhh..."
"Uhhh"
"Uhhhh....well, first you...you have to...I don't know where to start."

But then, thankfully, our next class started. Our next class was Computer Repair, which I also know nothing about. Nothing. Really. I just sort of stood around until the professor handed me a metal clippy thingy and a wire, and showed me how to twist them together and then I stood around some more until some girls grabbed this burning stick thing and showed me how to weld something onto the clippy thingy and then they told me I was supposed to wrap the wire thingy around the pencil, and I have no idea what I was doing or why, but apparantly I did it well because somehow I ended up with a wire thingy that everybody was really impressed with. Uh, okay.

After Computer Repair, we had break. I was starving but had left my money in my bag in the classroom, which apparently they lock during break, so Nicol bought me a bag of chips and a juice and introduced me to some of her friends. We did cheek kisses (that's the thing here, no hand-shaking) and sat down in a circle and at first, everyone was really quiet and sullen-looking. I was thinking, is something wrong? Do I smell funny? Do they hate me? But then Nicol said "They don't want to talk to you because they are shy and they don't want to practice their English...even though they should!"

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "No, no, no! Speak spanish, I need to learn!" and then I started talking to them in spanish and they all smiled and started to talk and were surprised that I spoke so much. Apparantly they were shy because they thought they had to talk to me in English! Haha!
After that, Nicol spoke to me mostly in Spanish and told people we met that I understood spanish, thank the Lord.

After break, we had the class Tutoria. To be honest, I'm still not really sure what Tutoria is, but I think it's some sort of economy class. I almost gave myself an aneurism trying to figure out what was going on. Attending class in spanish is really frustrating: I would say that I speak spanish, but when I am sitting in a chair and listening to someone talk sixty miles an hour about a subject I know nothing about, I really have no idea what's happening. Even if I know most of the vocabulary and I would be able to copy the lesson onto a piece of paper, sometimes I just can't put the words together, I don't know the rhythm; the phrases. It's hard to explain-- it's like trying to watch a movie when you're starting it towards the end and the volume is turned way down low. So I want to learn as fast as possible because I hate being that person who walks in on a movie and goes "so what's happening again?"

Our last class was Philosophy. Philosophy! Oh, thank you, sweet Lord! Rousseau, Thoreau, Locke, Aristotle...reading! Speculating! This is something I understand. And we even had a worksheet! Visual aid, yesss. Everybody I've met here in Honduras loves Math, Science, and Computers, but me? I'm from America! We don't have practical classes in High School! I'm used to living in a place where it's completely acceptable-- if not, normal-- to blow off math and to love choir and art and literature, and to have some fluffy plan for the future like studying Literature and writing novels or becoming an actress. (Apparantly they don't even have literature majors in Honduras!) Obviously, Philosophy is going to be my favorite class.

I was informed that they have fewer computer-related classes in the tenth grade, and I thought about asking to switch, but then I found out that seniors (11th graders are seniors here) don't have to take PE. Woohoo! So yeah, I'm staying in the 11th grade.

After school Nicol took me to a "Pulperia" accross the street with some of her friends, and one of the guys bought a 2 liter pepsi bottle to share, but we didn't have cups so we poured it into plastic bags and drank out of them with straws. Haha! I was also given "Churros", which are not, in fact, dough sticks covered in cinnamon and sugar, but a sort of savory chip. Nicol's friends made a few hilarious attempts at English conversation (what's uuuuuuuup?) and I was relieved to find that they are shy about speaking and/or don't speak very much English. Maybe I will learn spanish after all!

School tomorrow!!!

In Honduras, everything is hot. The days are hot, the nights are hot, the food is hot, the coffee is hot, the people are hot. But the showers are consistently, inexplicably freezing COLD! At orientation they warned me that I probably wouldn't have hot water, but luckily, the water here is room-temperature, at best, warmer than it was at the hotel. The days here are so hot that I don't mind too much, but it's just another thing to get used to.

Yesterday I tried my hand at using the Pila for the first time. The Pila is a rather brilliant clothes-washing contraption designed to use the smalled amount of soap, energy, and water as possible. Since the plumbing in Central America is inconsistent, the basin stores clean water and it has a bumpy board you can scrub your clothes on, and drainage around the sides. You pour water on to your clothes, scrub some soap on, and then as soon as you pour more water on it washes all the soap and dirt off of the board and you can squeeze it dry and hang it on the line. As I washed my clothes, I tried to think Honduran thoughts and not be bothered by the fact that a turtle lives in my source of clean water and my delicates will be hanging on a clothesline, flapping in the wind for all the world to see. I felt very cool and eco-friendly, and I'm started to think that those hemp-wearing, can-recycling, dreadlock-rocking hippies in Bellingham are all hypocrites and they should move to Honduras and see what green really looks like.

When Sra Ortega came home we had a dinner of cheese-filled tortillas and what appeared to be pickled onions and peppers and cabbage or something, and it was really good. I think they were called Popusas? Something like that. I also found out that I will, indeed, be attending Instituto Marista La Immaculada, and today my host mama was kind enough to take some time off of work to take me to the bank, and to coffee, and to buy some things that I need for my uniform. I had been kind of excited to get a uniform, because it saves me from having to decide what to wear, but my uniform is absolutely heinous. All of the uniforms that I have seen around town have been pretty cute: blue or beige pleated knee-length skirts, high socks, mary-janes, but mine consists of a below-the-knee brown skirt, a white blouse, white ankle socks, and black pleather oxfords. For PE I have to wear a white t-shirt and long brown shorts made out of the same material as the skirt. Blech. I got two skirts, two shirts, two blouses, two undershirts, two pairs of socks, a pair of shorts, and shoes for under $1300 lempiras, which is less than $65US, so yeah, stuff here is cheap. I'm still glad I have a uniform and everybody at the school will be dressed in the same horrible outfit I'll be dressed in, so I suppose it's a silly thing to be vain about.

Tomorrow I start school! I'll be wearing jeans for the first week or so until my skirt is done being made, but maybe I'll put up a picture of my uniform when I have it. Maybe.