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."