Digging Ditches

We spent two weeks in the small, dusty town of Cofradia, Honduras working at this wonderful bilingual school called BECA that provides affordable bilingual education. The words "affordable bilingual education" are rarely found together in the same sentence. Being bilingual is one of the most viable ways to a better future for most of today's Central American kids, but usually it is reserved for society's elite. The school was started several years ago through a partnership of some community members and an American woman. Every year, a new team of volunteer English teachers come down and teach for a year and live in the community getting paid zilch, pretty phenomenal people. We passed through here on our last trip, so it was cool to get to catch up with the folks we'd spent time with in November.

With some of the volunteer English teachers

Our days were spent helping out in classrooms and digging a 10-foot sewage hole for the new bathrooms for the kindergartners. Glamorous, right? Local ranch hands would mossy on by and were quite amused at the site of gringos in their country with shovels in hand performing hard labor under the blazing sun. The irony was not lost on them, either.




My new nickname is "Susie Snacks" (as I'm always snacking) and my students have almost convinced me to open up my own line of snack food by the same name. A business idea to ponder.

We took a weekend trip to this spectacular 150 foot waterfalls, actually hiked down INTO them (deafening and borderline painful with the power of the water coming down) and got to hang inside them for a bit. Never seen anything like it.

Another highlight of this portion of the trip is being 45 minutes away from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the site of a most excellent mega-mall that we affectionately call "America". Shiney marble floors, vaulted ceilings, a massive food court with every fast food option imagineable, the works. Malls, which I usually loath, never looked so good after two months of blissful hippie simplicity and non-materialism. It's nice to be a good old consumer every once in awhile :).

Hitching a ride to the airport in Don Max's rad truck.

One of the more hilarious signs I've come across in Central America (and there have been many). "We sell firewood, popsicles, sugar water, and rabbits."

Nicaragua

Border crossing from Costa Rica to Nicaragua

We had a week of free travel where the students decide when and where we go, and they chose to spend the week chillaxing in Nicaragua. Easily overlooked, Nicaragua for me comes in a close second to Guatemala in its natural and man-made beauty, and historical and political interest quotient, was glad to get to head back. We headed first to Leon where the big item on the agenda was volcano boarding (literally surfing down a volcano through volcanic ash like you were snowboarding), only it didn't happen as the only tour was booked for the next two days and we had to be on our way. Bummer.

On to Granada, the oldest city in Central America...it's easy to see the vestiges of Spanish colonialism here.

Drinks the park

Gorgeous central park fountain by night

We stopped in at one of my favorite spots The Monkey Hut for a night, a beautiful spot on azure blue crater lake Apoyo.

Lago Apoyo from the Monkey Hut

Armen makes a friend

Rats, Sharks, and Sea Turtles

Last week was spent kicking it on a turtle preserve on a remote beach on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. Our days were passed lazing in hammocks with the occassional beach soccer game with the locals and our nights were spent taking 3-hour shifts patroling the beach for massive endangered leatherback turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs before heading back into the depths. Lots of downtime...I came armed with an iPod chock-full of the mighty triumvirate of Lost, The Office, and Family Guy, my guilty pleasures, to help pass the quiet nights sans electriciy. God bless the video iPod.

Jessica living The Life

So the turtles...these amazing creatures can live upwards of 150 years and average 4 to 5 feet and lay 60 t0 120 eggs the size of golf balls. They face a bit of a battle against nature as well as humans...poaching became a big issue in years past (and still present). Turtle eggs fetch a pretty penny here as they're believed to have natural aphrodisiac effects, about $40 for a batch from one turtle, which is a good night's salary for these local folks. And if the poachers don't get them first, their nests oftentimes don't even survive in the wild from being washed away by the tide or eaten by natural predators. And even if the babies do get to the point of hatching and making it out to sea, about 1 in 1,000 make it to adulthood; the sharks are big fans of these cute little guys. So Costa Rica has recently become quite pro-active in protecting them and helping them bolster their ranks, which means snatching the eggs from the mama after they're laid and relocating them to a hatchery where they can be monitored and protected until they hatch.

On turtle patrol with Johnny and Jessica at some ungodly hour of the night

Although we enjoyed oceanfront digs, swimming was not much part of our daily activity due to the very shark-infested waters we shared our beach with. There were several reports of sightings alarmingly close to shore while we were there, which quickly cured me of my need to take a refreshing dip. And a word about the oceanfront digs -- really a crude shack we shared with ROUSs (Rodents Of Unusual Size for the Princess Bride ignorant) that came to visit every night. I like to think I have a high threshold for such things, but I did almost lose it the other night when I left for my three-hour turtle patrol in the middle of the night and came back to fresh rat poop on my BED. Not cool.

It was sweltering hot and thank God that coconuts abounded in this virgin tropical paradise, we kept ourselves cool gorging on cocolocos, or rather straight up coconut milk drunk straight out of the coconut with a straw. The group got really good at cracking open coconuts with a machete by the end of the week.

Cocoloco party

Hiking in to the beachfront camp

We've lost one of our ranks, Amanda, who decided to take the independent travel route and split off from the group to do her own thing for a few weeks. We were sad to see her go!