I spent two days last week in San Juan, La Paz. San Juan is a village of about 60 houses about 2 1/2 hours from Tegucigalpa. Until last week the town had no running water. The residents of the village (typically women) had to go down to the river outside of town to wash clothes, bathe, bring water back for cleaning and even for drinking.
All of that changed last week as the town held a grand celebration to open the spigots for the first time. With dancing and speeches (lots and lots of speeches) we celebrated a project that is bringing running water to twelve villages for the first time. A Bi-national project between Honduras and El Salvador (we were about 20 miles from the Salvador border) built the main distribution line to bring water 12 miles from the river to a main distribution point. From there CRS and our partner Caritas then built the local water distribution system in San Juan.
Two more villages are on tap for CRS next year and other NGOs have built or are building distribution systems for the remaining villages. It’s startling to think what a difference it would be to wake up one morning and have running water for the first time in your life.
Click here for pictures from the trip. Also up are videos of the traditional dance the school children did and video of what it’s like to ride in a Toyota Hi-Lux in the back roads of Honduras.
I usually leave the cute kid stories to Erika’s blog, Life With Three, but I thought I would steal this one so people can see my warm and cuddly side.
Michael has been riding the bus to and from school. Worry not, we’re not sending Michael out to the boulevard with a couple of Lempiras (the Honduran currency) and telling him to hop on the public bus. The bus is a 15 passenger van with a driver and a bus monitor that picks Michael up and drops him off at our front door. His initial excitement at being a big kid and riding the bus gave way to trepidation as the first day of school came around. With a little encouragement and some creative thought he made it through his first bus ride (”Mama, I’m going to take this book and ask the bus muchacha if I can read it on the bus.”)
Thus trepidation in turn gave way to comfort and sure enough within the first week Michael was talking about his bus friend Luke. It quickly became apparent that we needed to send an additional snack for Michael to share on the bus ride home and over Michael’s shared goldfish our two pint sized commuters decided that they wanted to set up a play date. But how to arrange it? A plan was hatched and Luke and Michael decided that the obvious solution was to exchange maps. After all, the bus ride allowed them to see where each other lived and surely they would be able to guide their respective parents to the aforementioned playdate.
When told of the plan, Erika responded as any good mother with a plan of her own. The next day, along with Michael’s sharing goldfish, Erika tucked a note. “Dear Luke’s mom…” A phone call later that evening revealed that Luke’s mom was Elizabeth, mother of three kids just a year or two older than each of ours. Luke’s dad works for the U.S. Embassy and like us they are newly arrived in Teguz.
So this Friday, Michael and Lukes plan to exchange maps will come to fruition with a playdate at Luke’s house. While this is a story about sophisticated five year olds it is also a story about the ease with which Erika has found connections here in Teguz. Within the first week Erika has connected with a bunch of other spouses of people working at the embassy or for other internaitonal organizaitons. The kids have been a good contact point and mostly we’ve met other parents from school. It’s amazing how simply being an American in a foreign capital provides an instant connection that is sometimes hard to come by in normal social situations. Moving overseas disrupts your normal social circles but it also provides opportunities for new ones to form. All it takes is for your five year old to swap maps with his bus friend.
We’ve been in Honduras for two weeks now and this seems like a good opportunity to pause and reflect on the weeks behind us and the week ahead. We’ve had a great two weeks in which we’ve gotten so much accomplished. We were lucky - my boss has been in the States on vacation and I couldn’t start work for two weeks, so I was able to be around to house hunt and pick a school for Michael while generally helping keep Erika and the children at least somewhat sane. We picked a house in three days and were moved in less than a week after our arrival. We spent the next few days grocery shopping and unpacking a little at a time.
After three days of moving in we decided at the last minute to take a trip up to the north coast to visit our friends Matthew and Andrea and their four kids Franklin, Charlie, Jimena and Jonathan. The 7 hour bus ride (each way) was less than thrilling to say the least but it was totally worth it to spend some quality time with friends. The kids had a great time playing together and it was nice to be able to squeeze in a trip before starting work and school makes scheduling harder.
Now that we’re settled in it is time to get to work. Tomorrow we have an orientation for new families at Michael’s school (The Discovery School). Michael starts school Wednesday, the same day I start work. We’re excited about getting started and excited about starting to reach out and build our community. Now that our house is settled (or as settled as it ever will be) we are thinking about how we can start meeting people in our new home. We have an exciting week ahead!
I’ve added a new feature to the website that I hope will make it easier for people to keep updated on what we’re up to. We now offer e-mail subscriptions so that when there is a new post you’ll get an e-mail linking to the post.
After a week of house hunting and being cooped up in a hotel room we are happy to be moving into our new home. It’s a great house up on a hill overlooking the city just a few minutes from the CRS office. It’s furnished with everything we’ll need to get started and we’re very excited. Click here to link to the photo gallery or click on the photo of the house.
After my last post about resorting to Burger King for my children’s amusement I thought I would just post an update that we found something much better than a BK playland. It turns out that Tegucigalpa has a world class children’s museum. We’re talking 4 floors of pure educational fun. Costumes, kid sized construction vehicles, a giant nose that sneezes on you and a life sized game of Operation to name just a few.
We spent the day there this afternoon and had a great time. Really an awesome surprise and someplace we’ll be going back to many times I’m sure.
…fast food. Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Little Ceasar’s, Pizza Hut, Popeye’s and so many more line virtually every street corner. The shear quantity of Dunkin Donuts rivals the number we used to see in Boston where DD is king.
Normally I would think about this in terms of globalization, American cultural hegemony or other vaguely academic terms. But on Wednesday night I could only think about it in one way: The Burger King has a playland. The boys have been troopers through this move and while it has been relatively smooth the biggest impact on them has been that they have been cooped up in a hotel room with TV as their only friend for 5 days now. They have been hopping in and out of cars, offices and apartments as we looked at 15 houses in our househunting search. They’ve been shushed in the hotel lobby and have had to eat three meals a day in a restaurant.
There aren’t really parks around Tegucigalpa or at least we haven’t found them yet and we’ve had to put so much energy into finding a house and a school for Michael that we haven’t been really able to focus on finding stuff for them to do. As Jacob says, “We boys. We need to run.” So Wednesday night we bit the bullet and headed to Burger King for dinner.
Strangely enough I don’t regret it a bit. It’s a touchstone for me about how there are tradeoffs involved in living overseas and I think it’s only right that we make those calculations both for our children and for ourselves. Just because I would never go to BK if it were just me traveling doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it for the boys to make their transition succesful.
And then there was Thursday night when Michael asked the inevitable. “Can we go to Burger King for dinner?”
We’ve landed in Tegucigalpa!After a 2 ½ hour flight from Miami to Guatemala we got on a little 40 seater prop plane for the 1 hour connecting flight to Teguc. Flying Taca with luggage is always an adventure so we were exited to be able to look out the window in Guatemala and account for all of our bags sitting on the luggage carts to be loaded on the plane. Unfortunately being able to see the luggage carts also meant that we were able to see when the plane doors were closed with 10 out of our 12 bags still sitting on the tarmac.At the very least it helped us be mentally prepared for not getting most of our bags when we landed in Teguc.Here’s a photo of us with our luggage before leaving Miami (yes we have a lot of stuff).
Landing in Teguc is an adventure to say the least.With so many hills and mountains surrounding Teguc there isn’t a direct approach and he landing pattern corkscrews in.About 3 minutes before landing you look out the left window and see the airport down below and wonder “How’re we going to get down there?” Then the wings tip over and you bank hard to the left dropping over a few hills you’re not quite sure the plane will get over. As you drop the last few hundred feet I’ll admit it’s a bit disconcerting to look out the right windows and see houses on the hillside above the plane while out the left windows the ground is still far below. All in all it’s a bit more Thunder Mountain than People Mover for those who have been to Disney World. Erika swears she’ll never do it again, but I think it was actually kind of fun.
So here we are in Tegucigalpa. We have 2 out of our 12 checked bags.We’re settled into our hotel and about to start house hunting. We have e-mail access in our hotel room and have been able to use Skype quite successfully so track us down on Skype if you have it.
With dancing and speeches (lots and lots of speeches) we celebrated a project that is bringing running water to twelve villages for the first time. A Bi-national project between Honduras and El Salvador (we were about 20 miles from the Salvador border) built the main distribution line to bring water 12 miles from the river to a main distribution point. From there CRS and our partner Caritas then built the local water distribution system in San Juan. 
friends Matthew and Andrea and their four kids Franklin, Charlie, Jimena and Jonathan. The 7 hour bus ride (each way) was less than thrilling to say the least but it was totally worth it to spend some quality time with friends. The kids had a great time playing together and it was nice to be able to squeeze in a trip before starting work and school makes scheduling harder. 
