Easter and "where the carcass is..."

April 8 2012

This past week has been Semana Santa, which is the vacation week up to Easter. We have been swimming nearly every day, playing kick-the-can each day, and doing our own chores (Miriam gets Semana Santa off). Stuart worked a few hours on some days. It has been a very relaxing week, away from the stresses of bilingual school and still trying to make friends there. Though it feels like we have been here a long time, we have only been here 3.5 months. So we are still kind of new here and the children are still sorting things out at school.

The swimming this week has been great fun. The children have particularly enjoyed having Stuart home to swim with them. They love having him launch them across the pool; we all love watching Abe take his turn, because his little body goes so high and far, his little arms and legs flailing against the blue sky. He has become comfortable and brave in the water, trying to learn to swim with no flotation devices. He was so excited to learn to touch the bottom of the shallow end. True to form, Jack has been unable to resist swimming, despite his cast. He has tried various techniques to keep his cast dry. The most effective is to simply hold his bright green arm out of the water, over his head while he trots along. Holding his arm in front of the fan when we return home is also a useful practice.

Jack and Henry are in soccer after school now. Their coach played professional soccer here in Honduras for 12 years and has been teaching soccer to children for 10. He is a pretty nice, local fellow, with three children—we see him in the store occasionally or walking along the highway going to the store. The boys have already learned a lot from him and come home excited about the cool skills they are learning and the “games” they use to learn those skills. The most recent skill is heading the ball and kicking a goal after a header.

Mango Watch 2012: Some mangoes have started falling from the tree in our yard! We let them ripen a couple days and then enjoy them. Yum!

Aspen: There was a dead dog over the fence in the neighbors’ back lot. It smelled really bad. Lots of vultures came and were eating it.

Henry: One day our trash people came by and they said our trash can was very stinky and we should clean it out. So we did. I washed it out. The smell was still powerful. Just a little while later, we saw flocks of vultures swooping down and landing close to our house, by the trashcan. We walked over to see where they were landing. They were obviously eating something. I climbed up the rock wall [actually Stuart lifted him up onto the wall] and I looked over and saw them eating a dead dog. One of the vultures was missing some feathers and it had blood on its back. A vulture was eating the blood off the back of the other vulture. The day after the dead dog was there, we went over to see it. All that was there was just skin and bones, literally. [Henry’s exact words].

Ranae has had this idea to make doughnuts for a long time. Here they call them ‘donas’, which I think is funny. That is how I will write it now, because it is much easier. Jack and Henry got up at 5:30 to make donas with Ranae since they were to be for breakfast. We didn’t have enough ingredients for frosting, so we rolled them in sugar and cinnamon. We ate them outside to let the crumbs fall to the ants and not our dining room floor. Calla left her dona on a plate on the ground. The compound guard dog, Figo, came over and ate it. He liked the donas, too. Calla was not happy about the dog dona-napper.

Calla has had a tenuous friendship with Figo. She is fascinated by him, but does not like that his head is taller than hers. When we go out on walks in our little compound, she is always on the watch for the wiry-haired dog, always ready to clamber up into our arms if she catches sight of him. Once we were walking to the pool and Calla did not see Figo approach. By the time she saw him, he was directly beside her. She turned and bolted in a millisecond, her whole body tensing, saying, “Oh yeah! Figo!” Figo continued loping along, tongue lolling, looking every bit a friendly dog. Calla was proud of her accomplishment to pet Figo one day when he was lying down to nap. She has reported her success to various of the neighbors: I pet Figo all by myself.

Abe: I put some cinnamon sugar on the donas, and I jumped a car over Henry.

We dyed Easter eggs using the food coloring dyes. It worked really well. Nearly all the eggs cracked in the pot while boiling, but they were still dye-worthy. The food coloring we had was “neon” colored. The egg colors were deep and pretty. We made some egg salad with a few of them, which was speckled various colors since the dye leaked through onto the whites a little bit. Even in Honduras, Stuart encountered his annual conundrum once the eggs were dyed: what could we do with all this great colored water? Certainly it would be a waste to dump it out! So, Stuart made guacamole the next day and added a little deep blue egg dye to it. The avocado green ended up being a nice grass green. I think the pancakes Saturday morning were tinted blue. And the rest of the dye met with an ignominious end in the sewers of Honduras.

Ojojona is a place just south of Tegucigalpa that is a little higher elevation than where we are. As a result, it is cooler and greener than nearby Zamorano. Our friends the Komars invited us to spend the afternoon in Ojojona yesterday. It is a little touristy and so has a few shops where you can buy artesanias—which is a broad term for tourist stuff, even if isn’t from artisans. Just like all tourist places, they have nice, interesting local stuff, as well as factory-made trinkets. Here, particularly, the shops specialize in mass-produced ceramics that are then painted by hand to be sold. We saw lots of brightly painted ceramic animal statuettes, masks, mushrooms (popular around here) and other yard ornaments and stuff to hang on the wall and clutter the house or garden. The central plaza has two large Catholic churches (one built in 1823) and a huge round Ficus tree with an impressive network of crisscrossing branches. The Ficus trees you see in offices or in peoples’ houses (the real ones) grow outside here and become enormous trees. I really want to grow one outside and get it huge, but since it freezes slightly in Turlock each winter, I am pretty sure it won’t grow there. Maybe by the time I retire, climate change will be such that it won’t freeze anymore in Turlock and I can plant one!

We did find some nice bowls made from jicaro (heek-a-roe) fruits. Jicaro is a local tree that produces the fruits that hang off the branches, not the end of the stems. The bowls are rustic, round, gourd-like with that brownish gourd color. We liked them a lot, partly because of the fact that the town just up the road from Zamorano Univ. is called Jicarito and is also where we attend church and buy stuff at the hardware store (“Ferreteria Sarita”—translated: Little Sara’s Hardware Store). Many employees of Zamorano live in Jicarito. It has made me want to grow gourds and fashion an entire set of bowls, plates and cups from the gourds that we could use in the house, esp. when guests come.

Ranae: The good news is that we survived our week without Miriam without descending into utter squalor. I was wondering if we would still remember how to take care of ourselves, and we did. The bad news is that we are in desperate need of a whole-house sweeping job—not because we didn’t want to sweep, but because Henry broke our third broom on the day that the market closed for a long weekend for the Easter holiday. We have averaged one broom each month. (Many items available for sale here are not high-quality. We have encountered that fact in our brooms, phones, and clothing. The universal guarantee is that an electronic item should be good for 60 days from time of purchase. Reportedly, many items last for just about that long. My cell phone [granted, it was super-cheap] stopped working at about day 54. When I went to return it, I found that I could not return it at the normal cell phone store; I needed to take it to their returns office on the other side of Tegucigalpa. Customer service is one of the comforts of home that we miss.) (Okay, Henry just confessed that he stepped on the broom when it broke. And when he broke our second broom, it was while using it to whack Aspen’s piñata. Both abuses are a lot to ask of a broomstick, especially when they are a bit on the wimpy side. The first broom broke from normal use as a broom—while Henry was sweeping.)

However, we focus on the things that are special here and that we will someday miss when we return to the States. One thing I love is the arrangement of fresh tropical fruit that we set up on our kitchen counter every couple days. Right now we have a branch of bananas, a watermelon, a couple mangoes from the backyard, a dozen starfruit, and some pods from a tree that contain white, fuzzy, mildly sweet seeds. We always have a branch of bananas hanging in the kitchen. We buy them when they are mostly green, hang up the branch (of maybe 40 bananas) and eat them as a few of them ripen each day. The starfruit are abundant on our landlord’s tree, which produces year-round. I like to slice them up and stack one slice of starfruit with one slice of banana. The sour and the sweet combine perfectly.

Another thing I love is the idea of cooking up a huge pot of beans to keep in the fridge and eat through the week. This is such a smart, inexpensive, and delicious way to pull together a quick meal! About once a day (for breakfast, lunch, or dinner), we have a typical Honduran bean-based meal, with seasoned red beans, corn tortillas, fried platanos, crema (kind of like sour cream, but pourable), avocado, a platter of veggies and a platter of fruit. Delicious, nutritious, and filling!

This week has been heavenly with the children home from school. I have enjoyed time to talk, listen, and play with them. Abraham has been delighted by the cicada skins that are left behind on the tree trunks once the adult cicadas emerge from them. He collected dozens of them this week. We decided to make a little diorama with some. We turned a Styrofoam tray into a little restaurant and placed the cicadas around the tables and behind the counter as chef, customers, and waiters. The three boys and I sat at the table working on this project and talking for an hour or so Wednesday afternoon. To me, the time was priceless to have the good company and attention of my sons.

Then later, the storm of Wednesday afternoon rumbled in, bringing wind and rain, lightning and thunder and taking away the electricity. . .again! Again we were so glad for our gas stove, because the power failed right at dinnertime. We ate by candlelight, and then after dinner, when the lights were still out but the storm had moved across the valley, we went outside to watch and photograph the lightning. The night was cool and breezy, and so quiet and peaceful, with few cars driving past and no lights from the valley. There was more precious time with our children to just talk and listen. The power returned sometime around 11 that night, and that was the last of the rain for the week.

I am happy for the time to celebrate Easter this week with our family. On Friday night, we each put something precious in our “tomb” (a suitcase), which we then closed and set aside for the weekend. This morning we read of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the scriptures, and then checked our tomb. It was empty! Each person searched for his precious item, and when he found it, he also found a bag of treats. Just like when his followers found the risen Jesus and he was glorified beyond what he was before, now our precious things were better than before. (To me, this tradition makes more sense than the idea of a mysterious yet benevolent rabbit dropping off treats. We have never signed up on the Easter Bunny’s list, which is convenient because I don’t think he services Honduras.)

Four months from today we’ll be flying home! Every once in a while, I am surprised by a wave of homesickness. I brush it aside and don’t let it stay, since we’ll be here for such a short time. But it is funny the things that I look forward to seeing again: Costco, a hotel in Miami, bran flakes. For now, we will keep trying to learn Spanish and experience life the Honduran way.