Feliz Año Nuevo!

Jan 1, 2012

Last night a friend stopped by to take nearly all of us to a traditional Honduran New Year’s Eve party. Stuart stayed home with Calla, who was already asleep by that time.
The tradition is to make an effigy (sort of like a scarecrow) to represent the old year and fill it with fireworks (mostly fire crackers) and other flammable material. For good measure, they also douse the figure with gasoline. They light it just around midnight and get out of the way! Many other fireworks are lit and it is a very festive, loud time. We read something about fireworks being illegal for normal people to have because so many children were burned at this time of year.

The fireworks were impressive!! Here are a few thoughts from those who saw it all first-hand.

Ranae: An unrestrained free-for-all with children holding flames and sparks zizzing through the crowd. It took me a while to decompress when we got back home, to ease my nerves.

Aspen: Awesome! I liked it a lot. I liked the color of the volcanoes and how they shot up.

Jack: There were these guys who were trying to shoot each other with Roman candles. They didn’t have very good aim. There was a little kid who was running around with lit fireworks. He was probably younger than Aspen (7 years old). It was awesome. We also ate soggy French toast [which is called Torrejas and is a traditional Honduran Christmas/Ano Nuevo food—the sogginess is syrup and it is pretty sweet, though not too bad and very wet.]

Abraham: A guy catched on fire that was a scarecrow. I held a sparkler.

Henry: They made a scarecrow and poured gasoline on it and stuffed it with fireworks and lit it on fire at 12 o’clock.

Stuart went to Teguc. to buy beds that will be delivered in about 10 days. Jack is going to make a video of the trip there…we hope to post it later, so you can get the flavor of driving in a very large, Central American city. We will be hooked up to internet this week sometime. In the meantime, our neighbors are generously sharing their connection.

One sad event was what happened to Calla (2 yrs) a few days ago. She was sitting, innocently as a two-year old can be, holding her doll and watching us run around during our nightly pre-dinner games. The wall was made of rocks, stacked up with a layer of cement on the top, where she was sitting. At that spot it was about 1.5 feet tall. Her dangling legs dislodged a rock that covered an ant house. Unbeknownst to everyone, including Calla, the ants swarmed out and up the wall where she was sitting. She cried out and we ran over and saw the HUGE number of ants on the way. Ranae was there first and took her off the wall and we tore off her diaper and skirt and brushed of the many ants. She had a lot of welts on the backs of her legs. As Ranae held and comforted her, she still had ants on her and one bit Ranae in the ear.

We administered first aid and she was fine a few hours later and is making a great recovery. Needless to say, we are certainly experiencing some of the huge range of ant diversity in the tropics.