Room to Grow

There is no need to descend deep underwater when the walking world is making you tremble, unfortunately I realized this 30 feet under the ocean struggling to breathe compressed air. Trembling, I must admit, was the state of our beings as we drifted away from the orphanage, on a lancha, upon multiple buses, an overnight in La Ceiba and a ferry to Roatan, Honduras. For some reason, we thought our escape from the U.S., the work world, the bills, the car, would open up all this time for ourselves, for each other, for more happiness, for healing. But what has happened is struggle, survival, and less time for us as individuals and friends. This realization hits you like an early winter windgust and stays inside you with a sense of disappointment that only you can bring on yourself, hold there, look at it, and eventually free yourself of it.

And so, Roatan, with its perfect powdery beaches, coral fringed edges that hugged the entire island, endless sunshine, and an ocean that brought forth more shades of blue than the assortment found at home depot, was beautiful, tranquilo, everything the guidebooks rave about. The island helped us to sort things out, talk, and come up with possibilities to enjoy ourselves more. Floating, yes, now that is good, and as my dear husband uttered ¨you´re like my grammy - a floating, long-legged creature¨ one balmy day as I floated on the piercing blue water of Roatan, as he struggled to fill his chest up with air to avoid sinking.

Matthew here. It's true, I can`t float and my wife can like a lillypad. Roatan was good to me, for the most part. I finished two books, and spent the remainder of time reading the other novel that is me. I realized where I have been this spring with my marriage and where I need to go. Funny thing, ordinarily, I always think that we are some marvelous organsism, our marriage, doing and being the kind of people I suppose or hope we should be. But suddenly, your person gets squeezed by it`s environment and you kind of sink inside yourself, like an anchor, and wake up to find you`re responding to the most minimal requests of your best friend with only grunts and groaning. How can that happen? Shamefull really.

We will be back at the orphanage this afternoon, with renewed spirits, I think. Without going into all the particulars, we have got to find time to be together other than sleeping. We also have to find time for space for ourselves. This isn`t going to be easy, considering the circumstances.

For me, every time the thought crosses my head that we should pack it in and head back to the states, and believe me I`ve thought about it plenty, I remember some wisdom my friends Tom and Colleen once told me. They spent a year living in west Africa, new cultures and language, struggle here and there, and told us our experience would go something like this. Initial honeymoon, then for three months you grow to hate everything about it, the people the places, every time you have to barter with a guy for a 5 cent piece of fruit.

We are not totally there yet, sometimes I`m close. And then, Tom and Colleen said, things will start to click and your experience will become, in your mind, the rewarding thing you hoped it would all be. We are waiting for the moment when the momentum changes, because we have a lot of love to give to this place and each other and there is so much room for us to grow.

And to shed a positive impression, I (heather) just got back from buying a bagful of fruit and veggies. I was happy, the interactions were all positive, I got smiles and not stares. Maybe I´m at least getting the hang of this.

Yo prefiero the chucharachas

Yo prefiero the cucharachas. I never imagined I would entertain such contemplation, but the nightly rats in mi casa, racing up through the rafters and chewing through my ropas like a new pup, or the pocito ormigas-ants- crawling up my legs like fire and in seconds flat clutching on to a nice bite of one of my sensitive body parts, or the black, crusty, prehistoric scorpions, geez, just give me the hibby geebies.

Now, I have a great reverence for life, to the point that most critters are nicely air-lifted and escorted out of our room, our house rather than face the death squad. However, the scorpions have made it off this list and are now squash material - all of them. For the spiders and tarantualas, we just leave them alone. They eat the mosquitos and tend to revisit the same spot each night. I just pull my nightly watchman duty, doing a nightly scope of the walls to assess the location of our additional housemates and move on. Now, do not assume we are without fear, each night the mosquito net is wrapped tight around the bed and the sheets shaked out to tossle any scorpions. Then, and only then will we attempt to slumber.

Our slumber and living at the orphanage is accompanied by a symphony of sounds. The over 500 chickens (right next to the house) cluck almost all the time, you will get the roosters going off any time of day as well, the ducks sort of live out in front and like to hang out around the perimeter of our casa. The other day I came home from work to find Matthew serenading a whole flock of ducks that were chilled out to his sweet mountain tunes. The howler monkeys are now feeding off some fruit in the trees above our house and so we get to gaze upon their presence often, yet one must be careful for where there are monkeys above, there is falling monkey shit and pee. We have not been victim yet, but have witnessed a few kids get slammed hard.

What else, ahh, the roar of the generator, my new alarm clock, that kicks on around 4 in the morning and sporadically rises and falls throughout the day, always giving us an excited surprise as to when and where we may be blessed with modern electricity. Then there are the coches, the pigs. I really like going and watching them. We have all sizes here, big pigs, little pigs, new pigs, old pigs, pink pigs, spotted pigs. When they snooze they just climb all on top of each other, and when they feed they do the same thing but with the most piercing bark. Some of the larger pigs will even stand up on their hind legs and balance their front ones on the wall, supporting their tonful bodies. Their heads lifted up in chorus, belting out for food, their ears flare out like dumbo, and yes, they too do this all the time. Yet, all these noises, along with the kids, the shouts of mira, mira (look, look) are all becoming part of us now. It is really only the dawn screches of the solitary pig being slaughtered that still make me flinch from my sleep. Today, here at the hotel run by the orphange I am overwhelmed by the constant noise of radio, jet skis, motor boats, people all day and all night long. Tonight, after working an unpaid 12 hour day, I am out of here and on a lancha back to the casa. Going to pack the bags tomorrow, hug on the necks of a few kids, and bus and ferry our way to some tropical, tranquilo spot in honduras.

Rio Frio

You just can't imagine how tough the skin is on the bottom of person's foot that doesn't wear shoes. You can lean all your weight on the needle but still have a hard time pushing it through the flesh.

It was late Tuesday night when they found me. I was trudging back to the house to light a candle and take a shower if we had any water pressure, and then climb under the mosquito net and right the day off complete. Always when I least expect it. In Spanish, the kitchen lady says, we need you to look at this kid's foot. Ya, already, like haven't I been through this bandaid on the knee bit enough this week, and I probably gave her one of the looks that my wife says are just evil.

I found him sitting on a bench, a big fat 16 year old who was just visiting the orphange for the week, and wow, there was a lot blood. Immediately, my sweat glands shifted from jungle sticky drive to cascade. Damn, I thought, here it is afterall, I going to have to suture this kid. I'm not ready. No choice. It was an ordeal for both of us. Him, because he was kind of baby, and me, because, well, I needed to close up this six inch gash on the bottom of his foot. Heather, who was spending the night with the chiquitos, the four year olds next door to the clinic, says she watched me for two hours under the candle light, croutched over the kid, pulling the string hard forward, up and around, with 2 adults holding the boy down. In the end, he was ok, but Matthew was drenched in fear sweat and worked off his nerves by helping the kids unload a shipment of supplies that arrived by boat at 11 p.m. Incidentally, the next afternoon a worker wacked his thumb with a machete and Matthew was gathered to sew him back together again.

At last count, I have eight years of university, I have been in charge of half million dollar equipment, spent time covering events in one of largest cities in the world, and I have helped save, now, countless peoples lives. This morning I toiled in cigarette butts and empty beer bottles, scraping gum off a seat and table, and then spent the remainder of the day taking shit from a 17 year old Guatemalan waitress. Yesterday, I washed dishes for five hours. Ah, Guatemala, you just can't always love it.

Heather and I have survived working 26 straight days at the orphanage, and we have stories to tell, both good and bad. But right now it's Santa Semana, Easter week, and instead of cutting us loose, they have kindly moved us to work in the hotel for a few days. The staff there aren't very nice, they're rather rude actually and that really makes it hard to do it for free, when I probably wouldn't do it for 10 bucks an hour. I have told a couple of people to piss off already, but they didn't understand my English so no satisfaction was had here, and of course, in Spanish I have been reprimanded a number of times for things which I still haven't translated yet. Just one more day here, and then we go back to the orphange, collect our backpacks, and head off for 9 days of descansa, rest, in the bay islands of Honduras. Probably Roatan.

Life at the orphange constantly leaves your head spinning. One minute I'm taking in the beauty of the river, watching the monkees, and then the next I'm helping 10 year olds carry 75 pound bags of chicken shit. The children, for the most part, are healthy, loving and a lot of fun.

However, the language barrier continues to be a battle. The kids don't speak English, none of the Guatemalan staff do, and while many of the volunteers, amazingly speak as many as five languages, all the meetings and just general workings of the day are conducted in Spanish. Conversational Spanish does not cut it. We both are working on our skills. I'm three quarters finished reading in Spanish, El Tiburon, which you proably know as Jaws. But while I'm seem to be reading at a 5th grade level, I'm remedial when speaking, and I might just as well have no orejas, ears, at all. The speed, the accents, seem impossible to understand. The language problem has made difficult things, for both of us, harder. Heather has found it particularly difficult sometimes to make a connection with the very young kids, perhaps wanting more. We both have broke down and cried at few times. Me secretly of course. We often say to ourselves, why the hell are we doing this. And then we rationalize with all the same things that got us down here. We will see how long that continues to last.

The food is not as bad as we thought it would be, and then at times it seems much worse. I think I gave a false impression last blog that we were eating well, fruits and vegetables, because there isn't much of that stuff and most goes to feed the pigs and for sale at the store in town. It's most rice and beans with tortillas all meals. We supplement our personal stores, when we got to town once a week, but without a frig stuff spoils in a couple of days. And then, of course, there is the rats in the house. Dig this, though, I actually enjoy powdered milk in cereal now.

Heather taught a sewing and art class last week. Rewarding and challenging.

I plucked a chicken last week. I helped the workers insert telephone like poles into the river to make a foundation for a chool addition. No cranes. You swim around, use pullies and small boats to raise them, then four guys climb to the top and pound it into the mud by hand. Amazing. They didn't let me climb the thing.

There was no class on Tuesday, the suture day, and we volunteers took about 50 kids for the day to Rio Frio, a clear cool creek for swimming about an hour and half away. I think everybody had a great time. Lots of cow pastures and thatched huts along the way. I carried a five year old named Selbin most of the way back. He was sweet, so I was tired but happy.

El Campo

Well, Heather can now add Enchargeadora de Los Tortillas to her resume. We are slowing falling into the rhthym of the jungle, myself, I suppose, more so than her, as she has been constantly pulled off one project to another, but such is the itinerant nature of the all volunteer work force. Some folks book it after a week, others eight months, newbees arrive all the time, but someone is always sick, or just too tired, fedup, or hungover to wake up and do it again.

I sort of flipped out for a day or two, but I am fine in my roles now. Basically, I work a few hours on the agricultural Campo, farm, in the morning doing mostly manual labor and then in the clinic in the afternoons. Sometimes Heather joins me on the farm when she can. So far, I have been helping getting this experimental crop going in one of the greenhouses. Collard greens, bok choy and swiss chard. Definitely not staples on the farm or in the guatemalan diet, but more on that later. Anyway, I do a lot digging and pushing the wheelbarrow. Not highbrow stuff but I like it. By the way, heather and I busted our asses digging this one hole for what we thought was a compost pile, but they promptly came and dumped basura, trash with plastics in it. Basura hole.

Heather has worked as a teachers aid, the tortilla lady which is an important gig here, on the farm, and will be teaching sewing next week and assiting with the chiquitas.

The main part of the Campo is run by Don Matteo and his beefy son Don Manual. I pass Don Matteo all the time. Hola Don Matteo, I will say. Hola Voluntario, he will say. Don Matteo has blue eyes, are a rarity for Gautemalans. Don Matteo has 14 children. Not really a rarity. On the farm, we have big water towers and crops of buckwheat, yucca, cumcumbers, melons, plantains and bananas por suspuesto, or course, and pineapples and tomatoes. But many of the vegetables are not for human consumption, they feed the pigs with that. And the pigs sell for big dinero in town and that helps support the orphanage. In fact someone sleeps with pigs each night so nobody steals them. I like the pigs much but will not sleep with them.

By the way, we have a water filtration system, sand and chlorine and bacteria that eats bacteria thing, that gives us the unthinkable, drinkable water. I am not kiding, we are drinking it. Ten days now and have not died from dysentery yet. Some volunteers have been imbibing this stuff for a year without ill affects.

We have 170 children here that sleep and eat during the week, and another 50 or so that come from the nearby aldeas, villages, like the one called Brisas. An amazing collection of families that live in bamboo sided homes with thatched roofs, surrounded by the jungle, river and moutains. Just like on Tv, only it takes ten minutes to walk there. Anyway, the kids have decent living quarters, get up around 430 a.m., do chores, breakfast and then hit the books, English, math, art and music, etc. And play time of course. Futbal, soccer nuts everyone and I am getting a little of the action. But I basically suck. There is also lots of activities and the volunteers are expected to help with these. They are usually fun. On the weekends, many of the kids go home, and only about 70 fulltime orphans remain with us.

Food is not too bad. Always beans and rice with tortillas, of course, but usually a small salad or something too. I eat cereal with powered milk at our house in the morning.

As far as the clinic goes, it really could not be a better situation. It is very well stocked. right now we have another nurse, from Canada, and a doctor for a short two week stay. I am diagnosing and prescribing meds, playing doctor, and I have not killed anyone yet. Mostly fungal and bacterial infections. One case of malaria.

We saw our friend from Asheville, Dennis, last week. He looks like Ernest Hemingway and sounds like Gandhi. Me gusto mucho. He told us about his adventures to Utila, an island in Honduras in the Carribean, and I think we will head there for our first break in two weeks.

Adios