We celebrated our anniversary with other MCCers Sunday night with pastry, coffee, and fresh fruit smoothies. Andrew and Amanda (red blouse, black shirt) were here to greet newly arrived MCC SALTers Rachel (left) and Michael (right) as they begin language study. A third SALTer, Liz, wasn’t able to join us that evening. SALT is a one-year program for young adults following college graduation. It has been great to have them here with us in Copan. They have all had international experience and are quite mature and self-assured in this setting. Rachel and Liz will be working in or near Tegucigalpa, so we hope to see them frequently during this next year.
Monday began the long _________ language study at Academia Guacamaya.
a. awaited
b. anticipated
c. dreaded
d. a and b
e. all of the above (hint: it’s this one!)
The first item on the agenda was a test to assess our level of competence. Three pages of questions in Spanish. We each finished part of the first page, looked at each other with an uh-oh expression and tried to decide how long we should wait to hand in the tests to maintain some semblance of dignity. Humbling experience #1. Next, we met our individual instructors: Louardes for Virgil, Cesia for Kathy. This went much better than anticipated. They both speak very little English, but are quite good at communicating and coaxing communication from us in Spanish. The first few days were, well “painful” comes to mind, as we stumbled over spotty vocabularies and conjugation of verbs that should have induced strokes in the instructors. As the week progressed “pain” changed to “reduced swelling of the brain” and eventually the ability to actually hold a semi-coherent conversation.
We have our lessons in the morning, work on homework in the afternoon or evening. Lessons are a mix of written exercises, verbal exercises (make up a sentence using the verb “conocer”), and just plain conversation. We have both had some really interesting discussions with our teachers on a variety of religious and social topics. Both instructors belong to the Quaker Church, which is a very conservative denomination in Honduras. I have had a number of conversations with my instructor comparing Mennonite and Quaker beliefs – talk about vocabulary challenges. Kathy’s instructor is very young and frustrated with her father’s constraints on her social life. Two different takes on the same set of beliefs. She is also considering a career in medicine, so Kathy has tried to explain what she did at LuK and they have compared the health care systems in our two countries.
My instructor needed to be off today (Friday), so we arranged with both instructors to double up lessons on Wednesday afternoon. Kathy went with Cesia to the market and several small tiendas to practice her Spanish and learn how and where to buy things. Lourdes and I thought it best for me to practice drinking coffee, so we set up at a local coffee shop for the afternoon. It was a great change of environment, however this was the day she decided to bring her young son’s flash cards to drill me on using verbs in sentences. This is a good exercise and went quite well until I noticed some school kids at a nearby table watching the gringo struggle to do what they did in who knows what grade. This was humbling experience #2. (I’m keeping track. I might start a life list).
So how are we feeling about language after week one? I am feeling pretty good – Spanish words are coming back, the Creole is going away, and I can carry on a decent conversation in the present tense. My instructor wisely recommended that although I have decent Spanish skills, we go back to review some basics before moving on to more advanced grammar. That has been helpful.
Kathy is feeling overwhelmed but encouraged and not as fearful as she was that she really wasn’t going to pull this off. She realizes it will be a huge task but she is beginning to understand people and to make herself understood. I am impressed with some of the concepts she has communicated to Cesia and to Doña Elena and her household. 
In fact today I was reading in our room when I realized she was downstairs walking around the garden asking Doña Elena about all the plants, how to grow them, make starts, and the names in case we want to obtain them for our future home in Teguc.
She even snagged some aloe from the garden to treat her sunburn.
And she studies like a fiend. Even as I write this, she is sitting beside me going over her assignment – and it’s Friday night!
The other thing that must be mentioned is the tremendous patience and grace that Hondurans have extended to us as we try to communicate, from the family and guests at our pensión, to the instructors, to store owners and folks on the street whom we ask for directions. If we are hesitant to speak Spanish, it is our own issue, not due to criticism on their part. In fact, we have to really ask quite directly to be corrected since most people will just smile and imagine what we might be tying to say.
Today we hiked from town ~ 2 km along the Copan River and up the mountain to San Lucas, a hacienda in the hills above Copan.
It’s a beautiful area with a great view of the city of Copan and the mountains beyond.
We took our time birding along the way to San Lucas and then took a trail through the forest to an ancient Mayan site, 
Los Zapos (literally “the frogs”) and beyond to a mountain village. 
The best birding was actually on the way back as we followed a narrow winding road down from the village to the river. We are seeing a lot of birds that don’t seem to be in my two Central American bird books. Likely because most of the surveys have been done in Costa Rica and Panama, very little 
information has been collected here. So I am anxious to meet up with a local birding guide next week to help us sort through some of the birds and help me identify the commonly found species in this area. We even have a few unidentified species seen from the veranda of our room.
We had one of the most surreal experiences while hiking….. our cell phone rang. That’s right – 
we have a cell phone! Land lines are expensive and not readily available, but cell phones are ubiquitous and service is surprisingly inexpensive for in-country calls. So here we are, on a jungle trek, looking for exotic birds in the wilds of Honduras and we get a phone call from the MCC reps in San Pedro Sula asking us to check on an MCCer in Copan who was ill. To make the point, we tried to get a non-obtrusive photo of this campesino taking a call on his horse. It’s not the best shot, but if you look closely you can see the cell phone. He wisely pulled his horse over to take the call… Safety first!
Post Storm Clouds
Weather Report: It has been rainy in the late afternoon and evening all week, with some very impressive storms brewing up from the west about 4pm each day. I forgot what it is like in the tropics during rainy season when you have to make sure you are either home before the rain or plan to stay put wherever you are for a while or get royally soaked on your way home. 
The evening weather has also been cool after or during the rains, enough so that Kathy wore her wool socks (while studying of course) and I my fleece. Quite the change from San Pedro Sula, and Fort Collins and Columbus and Ferrum.
Well, that’s the news from Copan, where all the men are strong, the women are good looking, and the children are smarter than the gringos.*
1 comment:
Thanks so much for posting! Anya looked at most of the pictures with me and I paraphrased what was going on with you guys. When she saw the pictures of you in your room, she said, "I don't know where I will sleep in Honduras." Not sad, just wondering matter of factly. I told her that you weren't in your house yet, but that sometime we would see pictures of your house when you eventually got there.
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