Cereal Feast

When you're away from home and familiar things for so long, you get excited about the most seemingly simple things...for example cold milk over a bowl of your favorite cereal. Yesterday the group got to talking and then salivating about our favorite sugar cereals. Golden Grahams, Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms and Coco Crispies made the Top 5, in no particular order. Rice and beans for breakfast everyday are great and everything...but after two months, some cold milk over those melt-in-your-mouth Lucky Charms marshmellows sure would hit the spot. So today, our cook having fallen ill with Dengue Fever and no one to make lunch, and having discovered that the tiny grocery store just up the street carries all manner of things American (gotta love Costa Rica), we decided to give into our urges and held a raging cereal feast for lunch. Lucky Charms never tasted so good.

Incidentally, from our cereal discussion followed many entertaining stories of childhood sugar cereal rivalries with siblings, of which I definitely had plenty to contribute. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my family wasn't the only one to have to strictly ration sugar cereal in order that it not be plundered by voracious brothers in one sitting.


I digress...so we're in Costa Rica (and the internet is now four times more expensive, so this will be a quickie). We're living in a tin shack on the beach and taking three hour shifts patroling the beach at night in search of endangered leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs on the beach. The project keeps an eye on the eggs to make sure they have the appropriate conditions to hatch and to protect them from poachers who can score a pretty penny for the illegal eggs. It's a pretty amazing site to see, we got lucky and saw one our first night out. 4 1/2 feet long by 3 feet wide, laying about 100 eggs twice the size of chicken eggs...never seen anything like it.

Cigars, Cockroaches, and Capture the Flag

Mariana and her Cofradia kids

We have bid Guatemala farewell and now find ourselves in Cofradia, Honduras for a couple of weeks working at a really wonderful bilingual school here. I was asked to stand in as a music teacher for the Jr. High girls one day last week, we learned a little Bob Dylan and could sing Amazing Grace in two-part harmony by the end of class, not bad. This Thursday I am booked to teach YMCA with body movements and all to the 5th graders. Aren't I quite the exporter of American pop-culture?

(By the way, I'll put in a little plug here for the school. If anyone knows of anyone looking for a wonderful volunteer experience down here as a teacher, go to www.becaschools.org for more info on the application process. It's a well-established non-profit organization and the recruiting process is pretty rigorous, the new school year starts next September. It's extremely well-organized and supported by the community and they're always looking for good volunteers.)

Our little crew has been absolutely amazing, helping out as classroom assistants, painting, gardening, and basically getting their hands and everything else imaginable very dirty without complaint. As we hear horror stories from our friends leading other trips around the globe, Nate and I have never ceased to be amazed at the maturity and general awesomeness of our group of students. LeapNow runs a pretty tight ship, especially when it comes to drugs, alcohol and general trip participation and students are sent home on the regular for breaking the rules. We were warned to expect having to handle pretty intense discipline issues as part and parcel of the job. The discipline part of this job was the one I feared most and I have yet to have had to crack the whip. We keep waiting with swords drawn and have found nothing but this lingering calm and harmony (aside from a few minor cracks here and there). Are we in La-La land?

One of the bigger tasks has been keeping on top of health issues, however. Stomach bugs have been plentiful and at one point 6 of 14 had fallen ill at the same time. There have been many a visit to sketchy clinics in one-horse towns and a magical injection in the buttocks seems to follow as the cure for most anything in these parts. But they always seem to do the trick, so I can only go so far in my jest. I myself have until now been completely exempt of any health issues (and therefore buttock injections) by some small miracle.

Pat on his sickbed

On that note, I had a most unique experience this week. I got closer to Nico than I ever hoped I would (no offense, Nico). We had to take him to the emergency room for sudden illness and the magical shot was of course prescribed. We were leaving town the next day, so all of a sudden I found myself taking a crash-course in buttock injections by the doctor, who treated it as the most normal thing in the world that I would take over in his stead. But the role of trip-leader is indeed a loosely defined one and I picked up the torch and did what must be done. I did it for the kids. Sorry for the PG-13 photo, but it's priceless, had to post it.

Part of the objective of LeapNow as a program is that our students learn how to become independent travelers. As such, we've been assigning different tasks to the students throughout the trip, such as figuring out transportation from Point A to Point B, making hotel reservations, deciding where to go for the weekend and all the details therein. A convenient residual is that it makes our jobs a heck of a lot easier! For example, we headed out to the beach this weekend and the students took care of each and every detail without a hitch, from figuring out where to go, to where to stay, to navigating the three bus transfers and 4 1/2 hours of transit time, and keeping it all within a pre-established budget. I just sat back and enjoyed the ride.

We landed in a little Garifuna town on the coast called Triunfo, which is populated by a group of people of African decent that came here hundreds of years ago and have stayed gathered around the costal areas all up and down Central America. Very little racial mixing has occured between the Latinos and Garifuna and I might as well have been in Africa by the looks of the people and my surroundings. The contrast was extreme and facsinating. There was essentially nothing to do in Triunfo except lay on the beach and hang out with each other and the Garifuna kids who decided to befriend us, which is exactly what we were looking for. At night our new friends came by and put on quite a drum and dance show, again, straight out of the Africa tradition...I forgot I was in Central America for a moment. We also played a wicked game of capture the flag on the beach by the light of a full moon, I lost a hundred Limpira ($5) in a poker game with Alison, Devon, and Nick and we were also entertained by Peter as he attempted to blow up the very large cockroach he had captured in a plastic bag with a string of Black Cat firecrackers he just happened to have on hand. It was pure carnage.

Making friends on the beach

The Garifuna Hoe-down

Peter playing poker with the boys...

Liesl the Mermaid

On Friday we hit the "vacation" portion of our trip: Two weeks on the beach in Costa Rica searching for endangered giant seaturtles and free-traveling, then a week in the Bay Islands back in Honduras scuba diving. Yes, my job is rough.

We hit up the amazing Mayan ruins in Copan on our way here, here are a few photos.