One Week Anniversary

Lauren and I have officially been in Honduras for seven days now!

A couple of nights ago Lauren and I were laying on the couch in our “living room” and we were praying together when we heard the high pitched squeal of our little friend Stinky the lizard. He sounded a lot closer than I was comfortable with so I stopped praying and looked around to see where the noise was coming from. That little guy was on our ceiling staring at us while we lay on the couch. As you can see by our picture, he is a very tiny lizard. He is standing next to a screw that is coming through the roof so that should give you an idea of proportion. You wouldn’t believe how loud he is—his screams will wake you up in the middle of the night.

We have been cycling through the same six foods since we’ve been here: Egg burritos, cereal, pancakes, bean & cheese burritos, mac & cheese, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches…we try to stick to foods that have the word “and” in them. I’m still enjoying our fat filled burritos, but I think Lauren is ready for something new. We buy pre-packaged refried beans from the Super Mercado in town and they have a fairly high fat content, but they’re pretty cheap so we eat them. We buy a pack of 5 tortillas for 10 limparas (the equivalent of 50 cents U.S.) and the hot sauce we use cost about 80 limparas (about $4) but will last us for at least a month. We bought a flat of 3 dozen eggs for less than we bought the hot sauce so we’ll be buying more of those for our protein source.

I have been using hot sauce on just about everything we eat here at the orphanage. I’m not what one would consider a hot sauce person, but it has tasted pretty good on most food here. I use it in my morning egg burritos, bean & cheese burritos, chicken, and hard boiled eggs on a fork. It is even pretty good on spaghetti. We had it last night for dinner and I couldn’t help but think out loud when I asked, “Lauren, do you think hot sauce would be good on spaghetti?” She responded, “Probably to you.” Lauren has been making fun of my hot sauce cravings, but she can make fun of me all she wants and I’ll still use it for the duration of our trip. I’ll update whether or not I’ve come up with new foods to add my heaven-sauce to.

There are so many bugs crawling all over the place! The other day I killed two biologically engineered red ants in our bathroom, a moth in our bedroom, some other unknown bugs and then a black widow and its baby in our living room. Lauren and I were sitting in the living room and as we looked up at the ceiling, we saw a white patch and weren’t sure what it was so I stood on the armchair below it to investigate. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it was a spider and had to be dealt with quickly. I grabbed a paper towel, rolled it up, lit it on fire and stood back on the chair to do my manly duty. I held the flame up to our new friend and up he went into smoke. I wish I had a picture of that to show you, but there was no time to get a camera to capture the intensity of the moment.

Yesterday Lauren and I went to Katja’s office to be assigned jobs for the duration of our stay at the orphanage. She directed her attention to me first as she explained that I would be doing maintenance around the school before the children come back on the 15th of February. Upon their return I will be assisting a teacher in the classroom in the high school. I will probably be teaching English, but that has yet to be determined. Lauren was told that she will be working with the special needs children at the orphanage as well as the kindergartners. I was a little jealous because I taught kindergarten for about ½ a year beginning in January 2008 and those little guys were so precious. Lauren may also be working in the dental clinic for a few weeks when their annual dental team comes in February.

Lauren spent the rest of the morning working with the school’s computers to see which were working and which were not. When she determined which were good, she moved them to where they needed to be. I was given the job of checking all of the schools bathrooms and asked to make a list of what I would need to repair. I’m not exactly skilled in the area of plumbing or bathroom fixtures, but I went about my job anyways. Once I had my list compiled, I went to the warehouse to see what parts I could find and was fairly successful in getting what I needed. One of the jobs I had to do was to put a new valve on a urinal in the high school boy’s bathroom. They don’t have the normal flush lever (guys, you know what I’m talking about), instead I had to put in a lever valve between some PVC pipe that the child turns on, then off to flush their business. Most everything is very makeshift here, but it works.

The second half of the day Lauren and I were at the stables with Bryce learning the basics of horse riding. We groomed and saddled our horses and went into the smaller riding area to get our first lesson. After we finished we unsaddled our horses and put them back in their respective stables while Bryce put a makeshift “bareback” pad on Grumpy. We learned how to mount a bareback horse and then how had the opportunity to ride him around. Gentlemen, you can imagine how “uncomfortable” it is riding a horse while you straddle its spinal chord. Of course when I was riding him, he decided to walk a lot faster than he did for Lauren. We each had to wear a helmet in case we were bucked off so wearing that in combination with my bright yellow shirt, I looked like a special ed kid on a field trip.

Our last responsibility was to clean the stables, feed the horses and then put them out to pasture for the night. As you can see in the picture, the horses know when its feeding time because they are all looking our way as if to say, “Come on guys, we know you’ve got something for us!” The horses from right to left are: Grumpy, Pharaoh, Joshua, the new colt, and his mother Faith. Pharaoh is a good horse, but he can be a bit of a stubborn horse as well. He jumped out of the pasture a few nights ago and broke the top wire fencing him in—he’s a bit of a rebel.

While the horses were eating Lauren and I decided to go take a look at the pigs that wake us up in the middle of the night. They tend to be noisy because they are located on the edge of the orphanage property where wild dogs roam, and where trespassers often come to try and steal the animals to sell for money. On a side note the local police told the owner that if trespassers come onto the property after 6pm, they can be shot and the bodies would be disposed of by the police themselves. I, for one, would not want to be caught on this property as a trespasser after 6. Anyways, we imagined some cute little “babe” pigs, but instead we saw some overweight, ugly, lazy, fly covered porkers. They are a good distance away from our humble abode, but since they are housed inside a concrete pin, their screams echo and travel a pretty good distance to reach out weary ears. If they’re going to keep us awake, at least we could get some bacon out of them when they’re slaughtered.