It’s been an interesting period since we last posted around two months ago. Principally, we’ve been busy trying to start new projects and continuing with old projects. Regarding old projects first, Emily is still working at the comedor infantil helping prepare meals for young children in addition to her bi-weekly responsibilities as an English tutor. I am currently in a lull with the projects I’ve begun with my primary counterpart, which has allowed me to search for secondary projects of interest to me. Principally, along with Emily and neighborhood leaders, I am helping direct a family garden initiative in the neighborhood. Together we continue to volunteer an hour a week at the local kindergarten (reading stories, creating activities, etc.) in addition to the time we spend coaching a baseball team alongside one of our fellow Peace Corps volunteers in town. Concerning new projects, within the next two weeks we’ll begin working with a local high school teacher to implement a once-a-week class with her students focused on citizen responsibility and action. The class will be structured around an existing program called Project Citizen and we look forward to starting as, of course, there’s always a need for the development of competent and passionate public servants and citizens. If this list leads you to believe we’re quite busy, well, that wouldn’t be quite accurate. Like most volunteers we still have a great bit of downtime in which we read, occasionally watch a DVD, garden, or entertain ourselves with one of any number of silly harebrained schemes we create to have fun (remember the pila boat).
Well, I suppose we’ve left you in the dark long enough about the meaning of that jarbled title we’ve chosen for this blog. Temblor = earthquake, gato = cat, and milpa = cornfield. Within the past two weeks we’ve received an 8-week-old kitten, experienced a 7.1 earthquake, and planted a 15 square foot cornfield in our back yard. In its own strange way, each experience has been both intimidating and joyful. Now, for the explanation.
Temblores. To go in chronological order, on May 28th at approximately 2:30 a.m., I woke to a sensation of violent shaking, which initially I thought emanated from our roof due to the commotion our metal roof was making. Although highly uncommon, it’s not unprecedented for a thief to attempt to enter a home through the roof, but I quickly remembered that’s only possible with tile roofs, whose tiles can be removed to create room for a thief to slip through. Then it hit me. ¡Earthquake! “Em, wake up, we’re having an earthquake” I said hurriedly, not sure yet whether to be afraid. We jumped out of bed to wait out the last ten seconds of what we estimate to have been a forty five second earthquake. Then, as quickly as it had all began, the earthquake silently slipped away into the night as if it were a carnival attraction being powered down, our dollar apiece now exhausted. What next; cotton candy, anyone? As is common in the wake of an earthquake, our power went out. For the next half hour we waited anxiously in the dark for an aftershock, for the power to come back on, something to break the post-trauma silence settling on the city. I believe our neighbors felt the same as we heard and witnessed a few of them waiting in front of their homes, asking one another quietly, “¿Está bien?” “Are you alright?” People giggled, perhaps for the same reasons we did: surprise, relief, and a hesitant sense of joy. As luck would have it, the power came back on and we shortly returned to bed where we’d pass the rest of the night sleeping fitfully, with clothing and our headlamps at the ready beside our bed.
All things told we enjoyed the experience more than anything, which, of course, owes purely to circumstance. Our home could have crumbled, our power could have been severed for substantially longer, and our local roads could have buckled amidst a host of other severe problems. Some weren’t as lucky as us. Although the damage was remarkably low for an earthquake of that magnitude, partially due to the fact that the epicenter was North of Honduras in the Caribbean rather than on land, some people’s homes were damaged, in total 6 people lost their lives, and long term damage was done to infrastructure elsewhere in the country. I think our memory of the quake will be one of mixed emotions, true dichotomies in fact – there was the sense of excitement at feeling the otherwise serene earth wake and shake off it’s dust, accompanied by the realization of having escaped a potentially life threatening situation completely unscathed.
Gatos. Well, in fact, only one gato. And further more, it’s a she and she’s a kitten, which makes her a “gatita.” About two weeks ago we received a phone call from a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who had heard that we might be willing to adopt a kitten. Subsequently, about a week ago, we adopted Luz, which means “light” in Spanish. She had been named Lucy by her former owners, and though we had thought long and hard about a name for her – ranging from Hernando (Dan was set on the name and was disinclined to change even though it was a female cat) to Cilantro and everything in between – we still had not come to a consensus on her name. When we walked into the room to meet her for the first time, I said “Hi, Luce,” as a shortened version of Lucy, but it sounded like the Spanish word “luz.” Dan and I looked at each other and realized that we had finally found a name.
Em and Luz enjoying en evening together in the hammock while reading Jane Austen´s Emma
Luz is a tabby and is very energetic, as most kittens are. We are really enjoying having her around the house, though she requires a lot of attention. She often tries to perch on our shoulders at mealtimes to put herself between our food and our mouths. If we are cleaning up the house, she likes to sit upon the shoulder of the person who is washing dishes or sweeping the floor. Often she mews while up there, looking very much like a supervisor critiquing the work of her subordinate. As we sit here writing this, we are also reminded of all of the loose threads on our clothing, loose shoelaces, unplugged cords, crumbs, clothing tossed casually on the backs of chairs, fallen leaves from our indoor plants, and un-stored plastic bags, amongst other things – in short, a majority of our home that previously seemed cozy, if a bit messy, that has now proven to be anything but “kitten proof”. Even though she can be a bit demanding, it’s all worth it when she’s peacefully asleep on our laps while we’re curled up in the hammock with a good book.
Milpa. Although we have been quite busy with different projects lately, we’ve been slowly preparing a 15x15 ft. plot of land in our backyard for planting corn. We received Sweet Corn seeds from Oregon, which we were finally able to plant last Sunday. Dan ingeniously made a fence of recycled plastic bread bags to keep the pollitos (chicks) out. As part of our project with family gardens, we wanted to experiment with different types of fencing because chicken wire is rather expensive. We planted over 200 seeds, so if all goes well we will probably be eating corn-on-the-cob, cornbread, corn soup, and anything else corn-related we could think of, as well as sharing with friends and neighbors.
How we Recycle around Here
So there you have it: Temblores, y gatos, y milpas, oh my! We have been quite busy the past couple of months and imagine that you have been as well. We hope that you are well and would love to hear what you are up to (and if you have any corn-related recipes, they would be greatly appreciated).
Leaving a Friend´s Site Early one Morning near Choluteca we Snapped This Photo
*As travel writers, albeit fledglings at best, we owe it to our audience to be as accurate as possible with our facts. In our last blog “Transcendence” we made a mistake. The Casa de Cultura (Cultural House) did not disappear in the blaze. However, the museum is indeed gone. Additionally, we mistakenly said that several items from the country´s "héroes" had dissappeared in the blaze. While it´s quite possible that the museum housed such items, what we intended to write was that the blaze consumed important documents from the lives of some of the country´s "próceres", the ideological warriors whom we know were enshrined in the museum.
