Back from the depths.

In which I make my comeback and hit the highlights of the past two months in Honduras.

Sidenotes:
I realize I need to nail my hands to the desk to keep myself from essentially doing nothing but flinging and flailing for almost four minutes. Ah, well.

Furthermore, I just want to say this: It officially looks like I am going to be a gainfully-employed, contributing member of society. More on this later as details develop.

Saira

I didn't know until about 5:00 this afternoon when I was at Casa Uno, but this morning, Saira left. Carlos Omar came up to me and told me that it was just him and Ricky left. I didn't understand. And then he said she had gone. I asked around. Ricky and others confirmed. So after, Abdul and Cristian Guerra wanted to teach me about soccer. Of course, I couldn't focus on their Spanish explanations of the rules. They had to say them over and over. Finally, for a few seconds, the indistinct shock and pain did disappear into the game, into the gateless driveway that we were using as a goal.

In Spanish, the word for fun is diversión. A diversion, a distraction. And it did distract me from my worries for a few minutes. Of course the kids love to play fútbol, to have fun.

I heard that she ran away, escaped from school during a test. I imagined her, white and navy uniform and all, crawling through the hole near the end of the chainlink fence. Now I know that she left in a car, with her mom. Karla saw her go, said she left with only her plastic, shoebox-sized Ayyám-i-Há gift box in her hands and the clothes on her back.

I think Saira was twelve. She may have been just a mediana, but she was my friend. She taught me the handsong with that really fast part, "Hola, comadrita. ¿Cómo estás?" I taught her how to knit.

The other girls tell me that she wanted to go. That she had been crying. I didn't know. I hadn't seen her for a few days. And I ate with the grandes instead last night. I taught her class yesterday, but she didn't participate. Quiet and invisible. So, the last I really remember of Saira was when we walked back from the terreno together. I got a picture of her swimming that day. She didn't talk much as she walked beside me with wet hair and shoulders wrapped up in a towel. Rosa and I were having a linguistic discussion about words like cheque and masiso. I guess I lost Saira that afternoon, somewhere on the road. I didn't know for how long.

I am asking myself several questions: Was I really her only friend, someone else to disappear? Did she get angry with me after I gave her a pretty stern lecture about how to treat books? Why didn't she tell me she was leaving? Because others seemed to know.

But there is one question I just can't get out of my head.

Were there two wooden knitting needles and a small ball of yarn in that little plastic container she left with?

26 March 2008, 7:23 pm

sitting on the back porch in afternoon

I'm reading in the shade while my clothes, the ones I just worked over an hour to wash by hand, bake in the sun. (So it must be that our house faces east.) The back yard is more of a gulley of dust, rocks, and roosters than a yard. And there are enough banana trees, with their hearts hanging out, to wrap a clothesline around so that it zig-zags once, twice, three times toward the place where we throw our biodegradable trash.

A wind just came through, gusting across the tops of the banana trees, and I worried about my laundry that I can't see. It's blocked by the white wall of the porch, with its garlic growing in cut-off bottoms of plastic pop bottles. But I can see through the break in the wall, where the steps are, that my skirt didn't even flinch at the wind.

As I watch it dry faster than I've ever seen clothes dry in the sun, I remember "helping" Nana when I was a kid, putting out the laundry and gathering it back up again. I didn't know then that it meant she was -- we were -- poor. We might have been saving electricity, but it wasn't to save the environment. No, there was nothing green about us, especially not the insides of our pockets. Green. I guess I was. I just liked running through the damp, billowing sheets, like they were the walls of a palace labyrinth. So we were as rich as I thought we were, as happy and as high as these bananas and mangoes that won't be ready to be picked for another few weeks.

02/23/08, 3 pm

This is just to say

I'm in Honduras.

The people are beautiful.

I start teaching English next week.

I don't know how often I will be able to update.

Email is more personal.

I hope everyone is well.

I am.

Too many things left to be unsaid

So, I'm Mexico. It's true.

Today, instead of tagging along with some Carhartt folks, I stayed in bed kind of late. (By "kind of late" I mean late enough for the maid to ask me if I was sick. Mm, no. Just lazy.) I don't have the means -- or the balls, honestly -- to meander about the city by myself, so sleep seemed like the best answer. I'm getting picked up at 1:00 so I can go sit in on five hours' worth of Spanish and English classes. The English teacher is the craziest Grammar Nazi known to man. During his smoke break yesterday, we debated the pretentiousness of impeccable grammar and the differences between American and Canadian English. My kind of fun. Things: So far, so good.

Along the lines of language: Holly had mentioned the author Bill Bryson to me a while back. Well, during my most recent tryst with Barnes & Noble, this guy's name was spied out of the corner of my eye in the philosophy section. With much interest indeed, I picked up one of his books called Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States. Oh, what a perfect pair, me and this book. I enjoy it so much that I even put in some quality reading time during the flight down here. That's saying something.

Rumor has it that I will finally have my car back when I return from this little jaunt. These two months without the Buick have been trying times. It will be nice to have it back.

Time for the shower, but before I go, I have a comment or two on the land of Mexico: Tell me, what is up with it being 70 degrees? I mean, I am eternally grateful, but something about this doesn't seem right. And the sky is big. I mean, huge. I had no idea how little the sky is at home. I hate to sound as cheesy as John in "3x5," but there are clouds and mountains for as far as the eye can see, and here, that's pretty dang far. But I do have my camera, so let's hope for some photos.

The beauty of the light switch

At this point in my life, I have so many things going on that I wonder why I do this to myself. I enjoy the fact that I have taken on a multitude of ventures. There are so many of them, I am not sure which one to deal with first.

I am amazed at how beautifully the trip to Mexico has come together. One minute, I am wishing that I could spend some time down there studying, and the next minute, I have been accepted as a quasi-intern for two weeks to help bridge the language gap for the company my mom works for. I'll probably be in Durango, Mexico, for the first two weeks of August.

In the rapid search to find a way to get to Mexico, I was also directed toward the Fulbright program. I am now planning on starting the application process to be an English Teaching Assistant in Argentina for their 2008 school year (March through November). This is similar to the Spain program I considered in the past, but with the hemispherical changes in the seasons, Fulbright's Argentina program works nicely with my December 2007 graduation. To be accepted as a Fulbright grantee is a prestigious honor. In some ways, I feel inadequate, but at the same time, I have never come across an opportunity more perfect for me. No kidding, the program description says that they give preference to graduates with degrees in Spanish, English, education, or TESOL. Three out of four ain't bad, I say.

It is unbelievable how much my decision to become a Spanish major has changed my life. Yes, of course, graduating in five-point-five years (instead of four-point-zero) means that I'll be left here in the wake of all my friends (especially my bff/), the two best professors I've ever known, the 762 campus prefix, and a billion other things that I have grown to love that are moving on.

I am tempted to believe that I am just another case of arrested development, being afraid to move on to the "real world" and avoiding it by staying in school. But something tells me that if I had graduated with only a secondary teaching certificate for English, I would have never had the opportunity to become whatever it is that I am bound and determine to become. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I am not worrying. I feel like I am slowly whittling out my passions, and once I find them, I don't think there is any stopping me. I know. I am usually not the cocky sort (how about that false humility?), but I'm beginning to see how I have inherited a sense of determination from a long line of hard-heads.

This morning at the desk, I have been knitting because I have finished with finals, and I've nothing else to do. And knitting lets me think and be productive at the same time. In the middle of all those thoughts, an image I haven't seen in years appeared in my mind. The house where my parents live -- one of the places I call home -- was my grandparents' before it was ours. Off to the side is what we call the "building". I am not sure, but I think my grandfather built it himself. (The fact that the house and the building are so close together that it's a fire-hazard tells me that, yes, he built it.) He was a man of determination. He was a farmer, but he was also an inventor. Innumerable times have I heard my aunts and uncles tell about how he fashioned tools himself if he needed to do something and didn't have the right gadget -- either because he was frugal farmer or because the tool had not been invented yet. (Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.) I've heard how he invented the automated tobacco-plant setting contraption years before it went on the market.

But this morning, a simpler "invention" came to my mind. I guess you could call it the precursor to the modern light switch. This building off the side of my house is lit by a bulb turned off and on by a chain. The problem my grandfather faced (and probably created himself) is that the bulb is located in the middle of the room. By the time a person clambered over all the monkey wrenches and anvils strewn about the darkened building in order to reach the chain, several bones would be likely broken. He remedied this simply. He tied a long string to the end of the chain and tied the other end of that string to a nail in the door post. When someone walks in the door, all you have to do is pull the string that stretches to the middle of the room and there will be light. My dad, who has filled the building with his own tools, gadgets, and general beloved junk, keeps my grandfather's lighting system in place. A "normal" light switch could easily be implemented by my brother-in-law who is an electrician. But we keep it, I guess in a sort of reverence to my grandfather and his mind.

I am sure he was not the only one to think of this solution to the unreachable chain. But the point is he did think of it. And he implemented his solution. He had a problem and he wasn't going to let it stop him from doing what he wanted to do -- which was to keep both shins in working order. And I think I've inherited this. And maybe I've inherited a bit of his zaniness, too. For example, when he got his cordless phone in the early 90s -- the prehistoric model with an extendable antenna a yard long -- he rigged it to his overalls with a shoestring so that he could carry it with him while he mowed the yard. I, too, have had my own harebrained ideas about what will work and what won't. (The cordless phone lost reception so far away from the base, and he wouldn't have heard it over the lawnmower anyhow.) What I have learned, though, is that if I don't take the risk of looking like an idiot (who can't even graduate on time), my life will be far less beautiful.