I'm a College Kid: Honduras Day 8.

A good day and a good night in Honduras today!!

Journal Day 8, May 20, 2013

It was back to the school today after a long day of shopping yesterday. We had corn flakes, fruit, scrambled eggs with peppers, sausage, and a toasted cheese sandwich for breakfast. The school day began a little differently than usual: on Mondays, every student in the school meets in the multi-purpose room for Acto Cívico, where the students sing the Honduran national anthem, the pledge of allegiance, and listen to announcements. It was really cute to see all the students together and singing!

We had Spanish this morning, and then a small recess where Becca and I practiced today’s math lesson. PE was next, and the students were playing soccer, so of course Becca and I joined in! We didn’t bring the right shoes, so we had to go barefoot, and I was running around in a dress! I was so dirty by the end of it!! But it was a lot of fun playing with the students, especially because they kept dancing in the field as a punishment every time the other team scored a goal. Soooo adorable!

Becca and I joint-taught a math lesson after PE and helped the students work on their assessments. I wish we were here longer so we could have more practice in front of the classroom, because I know we won’t get anything close to this in our blocks when we get back to Purdue. Two weeks just isn’t long enough!

We had lunch afterwards, which was a slab of pork with onions, carrots, potato salad, rice, tortillas, and watermelon juice. And then the horror came. We left lunch to go play recess with the students when we saw a bunch of the younger students pointing on the ground. We went over to check it out, and lo and behold, THERE WAS A DEAD TARANTULA LAYING THERE!!! We freaked out, naturally, because we had never seen a wild tarantula before! Only in a zoo or pet store! The kids just kept poking at it with a stick and it was so gross! Megan even picked it up with a leaf and brought it to JoAnn to scare her! Although we were all freaking out, the students kept saying they weren’t afraid and that they liked to put tarantulas in bottles and carry them around and show people. They said that a lot of tarantulas lived near the soccer field, aka the place I had just been playing soccer barefoot hours before!! Ahhh!! So we followed the students on their hunt for tarantula holes and we found a few. The kids said that the way to get them out was to pour water down their holes to drown them out, so us, being the idiots we are, did! There were a ton of students standing around and we poured bottle after bottle in the holes until finally we saw one start to crawl out of the hole! It was so disgusting. Then the kids graced us with the knowledge that snakes and scorpions just roam around Honduras too. Ew.

After that excitement, we had art with Mr. Carlos, the music teacher. Brian actually taught the lesson and the students had a lot of fun with drawing, coloring, and painting. Then, we went to the multi-purpose room to eat a cake that some of the students’ parents brought in for Miss Krisna’s birthday, the teacher aid. It was soooo good! It was a very moist white cake with fruit on top and Cool Whip-type frosting on top. Talk about delicious!

When school ended, Katie, Laura, and I headed straight to the pool (because for once I actually had my stuff with me), but everyone else headed back to the hotel. While we were there, some random guys came to the pool and were asking us questions about why we were in Honduras and how long we were there and such…You know, the basic, friendly stuff that people around her ask. However, these guys were creepy. Not in the, “I think they’re going to kidnap me,” type of creepy, but they were just creepy. One of them was 30 years old for goodness sakes! They kept asking if we wanted to play in a basketball tournament this Friday and we were like, “Uhhh, no.” And then we left.

Dinner was just the students tonight since Eloisa and JoAnn had dinner at a friend’s house. We had pork with onions like at lunch, as well as avocado and tomatoes and rice. I didn’t eat a ton because I wasn’t really feeling it, so I’m kind of hungry now. Laura, Katie, and I did some laundry then and helped to organize some more supplies for the rural school we’re going to tomorrow…can’t wait!

But the best part of the day came at 9, when the Zamorano students are done with their study hours. The 2 other girls and I walked to where Gustavo and his friends live to meet up with him to hang out for an hour before their curfew came at 10. However, before he came outside, some random guys came up to us and did the kiss/hug thing, and we were afraid that we met them at the party on Friday and couldn’t remember who they were! However, Gustavo came outside and we asked if we knew the guys and he said no, so we were really confused. But then we figured out what it was: Gustavo continually showed Katie off to his friends, saying, “This is Katie!”, like he’d told them about her before! It was really funny. But me, Katie, Laura, Gustavo, and his two friends, Jeffry and Juan (my dance partner) all went on a walk down near ABSS school. We passed by the basketball court and there were a ton of students standing in rows facing forward. We asked Gustavo what that meant, and he said that Zamorano has something called colonies where everyone from a country is grouped together (Honduras colony, Nicaragua colony, etc.) and they have certain rules to follow within their colony, besides those of the school. The students that we saw were apparently getting punished for not following the rules, and I guess if you do something really bad, you get excommunicated from the colony and nobody talks to you!

It seemed so extreme. It seriously seems like Zamorano is haze central though! Apparently all the 1^st year guys are called “dogs” and have to do everything the older students ask, such as cleaning their room or borrowing their bike or things like that. It’s so bizarre! They also call the girls here “spiders.”

We all hung out and chatted for awhile, looking at the whole 2 stars that were visible from where we were. It was a lot of fun, and there were a lot of laughs because the guys are so easy going. They also gave me some reggaeton artists to listen to since I’ve all but fallen in love with the music. However, 10 o’clock came rolling around, and the guys had to be back at their residence, so we started walking back. We passed by a 4^th year student (who are the “bosses” of the younger students) on the way back, so the guys told us that if they gave us any trouble, just say, “Estoy perdida!”, or, “I’m lost!” But we were fine, and we made it back with a minute to spare. It was seriously so much fun, and now the girls and I are just sitting out in the lobby and making lots of new Facebook friends and such! It’s a good time! We’re actually going to be able to go on a bike ride with them tomorrow (the guys are going to use their seniority to take some bikes from first years!)! Can’t wait!

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