The Long Weekend

Monday, September 15th, Honduras celebrated it's independence day. In light of the holiday we were given both Monday and Tuesday off, making it a 4-day weekend. Most of the North American teachers took advantage of the long weekend by taking a vacation to the caribbean coastal town of La Ceiba. But not the green house! Most of us had already been there and we didn't feel like spending so much money this early on in the schoolyear, since we've only gotten a third of a paycheck thus far. Instead of the vacation at the beach, we had many other adventures to keep us busy instead:


Saturday morning we got up early, Jake picked us up at 8:30 and we spent nearly the entire day building a classroom for a small church about 5 miles outside of Tegus. When we got there, we found a pile of rocks and dirt, 7 posts cemented in the ground, and a large pile of wood planks on the other side of the fence. 7 hours and a lot of hard work later, we left them with 4 walls, a doorframe, 2 windows and half a roof, while we took away some sore muscles, sunburns and lots of mosquito bites. It was great fun, but we had no energy to do anything else that night except sit at home and watch Friends.

On Sunday, Megan, Melissa, Bertha and I set out to find the CRC church that Gregorio Sanchez is the pastor of. BT had a bit of an idea where it was, so we commenced the search. We drove halfway up the mountain, keeping our eyes peeled on both sides for any sign of it. After asking a number of nice people and getting the same number of confused looks, we decided it was hopeless. But as Megan was quick to point out, "Who needs church, when you have Mas por Menos?" When we got back down the mountain, we decided to check out Mas por Menos, a grocery store that carries a lot of U.S. brand name items that you can't get elsewhere in Honduras. So after a little shopping, some lunch, and a visit to the big Catholic Basilica, we made our way back home. That afternoon, we hear Bertha holler down from her apartment, "Corrie! Megan! come look at this." Megan runs upstairs and comes back shortly announcing that Bertha had found and trapped a live chinche in her bedroom. Now, keep in mind, we just got our place fumigated for chinches on Thursday, and this is Sunday. We were all a little freaked out. After talking to a number of people, including Fu, who came over and looked at the bug and a suspicious-looking bite on Anna's arm, we decided it would be ok to spend the night that night (apparently chagas is fully treatable if you take care of it in a reasonable amount of time). We spent the night, but everyone was quite uneasy the whole night and I don't know how well anyone slept..

Monday morning the fumigator shows up again. We pack up enough stuff to spend 2 nights at Dona Bertha's house again and take off. This time they are fumigating our house again, spraying the whole mountainside, where the chinches are coming from, with the pesticide and then on Thursday or Friday the government is supposed to come and cut down all of the grass and brush on the hill above our house. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that everything will turn out ok. After dropping stuff off at DB's, we went out for lunch and then Melissa, Corrie and I took a taxi to the dentist. Dr. Marco Mass, a friend of ours from IST gave me a filling and Melissa a cleaning. When it was all finished we headed back to the mansion for spaghetti dinner and a game of hand and foot, which BT and I won!

This morning, after a quick pancake breakfast, we all piled in Bertha's Land Rover and took a trip to Danli, a town about an hour outside of Tegus that is famous for its cigar industry. We took a private tour of one of the cigar factories... that place was amazing! They get their tobacco from all over the world: U.S.A., Italy, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Brazil, and many more. There are 600 people who cover all parts of the process, from sorting leaves, to rolling cigars, to wrapping them with damp tobacco leaves, to putting brand name stickers on each one individually, to packaging them in bundles or boxes and shipping them to all over the world. It was quite an eye-opening experience. Now we are back at DB's, we just got out of the pool and are getting ready to go get dinner.

WHAT A CRAZY WEEKEND!!

Tomorrow we have school, and then hopefully we can move back into the green house which if everything went according to plan should be chinche-free!