Aspen has been taking horseback riding lessons on Mondays and Tuesdays--$10/lesson or $70/month—one on one. It is pretty cool and she loves it. She was a little sore at the beginning, but that little young body is strong and she is not sore now! The boys also played a soccer game on Tuesday and won, finally, against a team that usually beats them.
Jack: On Friday a bird pooped on me. [surely it was a cool tropical bird with neat plumage!]
Ranae: We hung up mosquito nets around each of the children’s beds, as much for the plague of ants as for the mosquitoes. (The ants and termites are in their season of dispersal—winged members of their colonies are emerging and flying away to start new colonies. The colony of ants that lives in our living room wall has sent forth hundreds of winged ants into our home. The other afternoon the air outside was filled with thousands of termites.) This is a shot of the light during the onslaught of ants.
The bad news is that on Wednesday, upon returning home with Stuart (after a morning of collecting data on his mahogany trees), we found a handful of strangers sitting around the outside of our gate. They were indeed simply sitting on the grass, a few on either side of the entrance to our yard and driveway. Driving up to them and between the two groups of them gave me a nervous feeling in my belly. Who were these men? Why were they hanging out around our house? We found the kitchen door closed (we always leave it open). Miriam met us at the door, likewise uneasy. She said the men had been there most of the morning. When she had asked them what they were doing, they would not give her any response. She had shut herself and Calla up in the house, hoping all was well.
Stuart went out to talk to them and then to our landlord’s son, Fernando, who lives next door. The men’s story unfolded, and that’s where the good news comes in.
The good news is that these men were from a little village down the highway called Maraita, and they were at our house for an exciting project. Their town has no electricity. The townspeople struck a deal with the energy company, that if the town would supply the labor to put up poles and string up the wires, the energy company would start service to their town. These men were trying to prepare the way for some of those electricity wires. They needed to trim some branches from the magnificent Guanacaste tree in our yard. They had machetes and a bottle of soda; they were waiting for someone who was going to bring a chain saw, and the soda helped the hours pass more enjoyably.
But then there is more bad news. The men stayed for much of the day, still waiting for a chain saw that never showed up. The next morning they returned, and the chain saw arrived. A young man (maybe 16 years old or so) climbed up in the tree, barefoot, and started hacking with the chain saw. He was not a skilled arborist. The glorious Guanacaste tree was badly injured. The young man cut each branch near its base, and the weight of the entire branch as it separated from the tree ripped off long jagged sections of wood. The branches dropped on the existing power and communication lines, dragging them to the ground. The branches dropped on the rock wall that surrounds our yard, bringing down a section of it. The slope outside our yard was full of Guanacaste branches. It was a mess. Fernando talked to the men and told them they needed to repair some of their cuts on the tree and clean up the branches. Though they did spend the afternoon hacking the branches into stackable pieces with their machetes, we are still waiting for them to come back to finish the job and repair their damage. I fear our landlord, who is traveling in South America, will not be happy to see the state of the yard and tree. Even the fact that the cuts were made for a good cause does not excuse the manner in which the job was done.
Which leads me to another thought: Living here gives us the opportunity to experience life in a more “wild west” or Montana sort of way. The structure of society is more primitive, with fewer laws than in the U.S. (particularly California) and less enforcement of the laws that do exist. There is less imposition of the needs of the society as a whole on the life of the individual. There is some greater freedom, in that we can make more of our own choices without government making them for us. But there is also some loss of freedom, in that the more primitive society offers fewer opportunities to choose from. Each person is left to act for himself and demonstrate what kind of person he is.
And we have met so many wonderful people, who are trying their best to do good and who live happily and simply and generously.
The day of the Guanacaste slaughter was the day Miriam brought some leaves from her platano (banana) tree so we could make tamales. They were easy and delicious. When Abe came home from school that day, he started visiting with Jorge, the groundskeeper/maintenance man in our little compound. Abe did not want to leave Jorge and come in for lunch, so we invited Jorge to come join us for lunch, too. Jorge, Miriam, Stuart, Abe, Calla, and I had a pleasant lunch of fresh tamales and fresh mangoes from our tree. We enjoy these friends.
Abe: Mom says, “Abe what did you talk about in [your class ] at Church today?” Abe said, sort of indignantly and matter-of-factly, responded, “I don’t know. I didn’t understand anything. They were speaking Spanish the whole time!”
Stuart: This week I didn’t write down as much but there were a lot of neat things that happened, I just can’t remember them all. Jack and I have gone to Teguc twice this week. One time was Tuesday for the commemoration of the Restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood by John the Baptist on May 15, 1829. We went to the site of the new Tegucigalpa Honduras Temple, which looks great, but you can see it is still clearly under construction. I wasn’t sure the neighborhood we’d be going through and being in, so I left my camera home. But if you images.google.com the Tegucigalpa Temple, you can see pictures of it. It is always a sight to see that lifts your spirits and great good will come to Honduras once the temple is here and the people begin to go there and become a temple-going people.
On the way back from the temple, along the highway from Teguc, we cross some pretty high elevation, just nearby the cloud forest. As such, it can get really foggy. Tuesday night, it was really foggy. Compounding the driving problem is lots of curves, no good white line on the right, and the tint on the window is VERY dark—making driving at night while looking through the tint impossible. So, I slowed down very slow and we followed a moto.
Like Ranae mentioned last week, the highway from Teguc to Zamorano has 3 major breaks in it where the road is dirt/bolders/gravel. These are areas where there have either been landslides (2) and the road hasn’t been repaired, or it is place with regular running water, so the asphalt disintegrates (1 place). Each section is about the same length—about 150’ or so. That night, practically in the center of one of them, a truck about the length of a mid-size U-haul truck was stranded. Its cargo space was made of slatted metal sheets, and it has an open top, though mostly covered by an olive-colored canvas tarp. It had broken down…literally. The cargo space, fully loaded with sandia (watermelon) somehow (the weight maybe?) had broken off of the truck chassis and was leaning precariously to the side, as if it were going to tip over. Think of a large, sandia-filled box, tipping off to the side. The clever drivers had shored-up the container with four large poles that were keeping the entire load from slipping off the truck chassis. The poles extended from the truck into the opposite lane essentially, making the area a single, narrow-lane passage. At night, in the fog, with the tint, I was a little nervous passing by the truck, as the single lane fell away about 40’ down and then a long steep slope going down a long way into the trees. Needless to say, we made it by the sandia truck and a few days later, when we passed by that spot again, there was no sign of it. The situation with the sandia truck did remind me of the sandia truck in Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go book—a sandia truck overturns on icy roads and the animal drivers are scurrying around to pick up the watermelons that are rolling down the road.
We had another YM/YW activity at the Stake Center in Teguc on Saturday. It was for training for the youth to get them to do Family History work. One thing about these meetings here in the Stake, is we often have a visiting Seventy there. One way to think of a Seventy is a person who is asked to serve in the region as a liaison between the local folks and the Church HQ in Salt Lake City. In the US, it is rare that a Seventy attends these kinds of meetings and usually much of the work there between local folks and a Seventy is done via telephone, email or by letter. Here Seventies are present at a lot of the stake-level meetings we attend. I told Jack he has probably been to more meetings with General Authorities in the time we have been here than I have been in the last 10 years. That might be an exaggeration, but the general authorities and Area Presidency play a more visible role in the Church here than in the US.
One more note….mango season has arrived in the Yeguare Valley! Yeee Haw!! I am pretty happy about that. We began harvesting real, ripe, tasty mangos from our tree in the backyard this past week. They are coming on pretty fast, so we have to be diligent and eat them as they come in…what a shame. This year has been a down year for mangos here so there actually aren’t a lot of trees with mangos, which is the real travesty. Last year people were up to their ears in mangos. So maybe in a few years, mango season will be huge again—too bad it wasn’t this year!
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