Sports Day

On Friday we had Sports Day. It was more a morning of games in the outdoors than actually sports. The whole school was divided into groups, mixing up ages, with a teacher or 9th grader in charge of each group. My group was Italy and I had a big 7th grade boy named Felipe who named co-captain and put him in charge of ordering the rest of the team into a line at each event. I also had 6th, 5th, and 4th grade girls. I really don't know any students above 4th grade, they have different schedules and are in a different part of the school. I had Diego, from my class, who Tony probably put in my group because he would drive any other teacher crazy with his total inattentivness and wandering around. Then I had a 2nd grade girl, Alexia, who was cute as could be, and a 1st grade girl, and a 1st grade boy who is even worse than Diego for wandering off. But our group was pretty good, and Felipe and the 6th grade girl helped keep them all together as we went from game to game.

We had a blindfold egg race (all games, we competed against another team), we had a dizzy race, the kind where you turn around 5 times then try to run in a straight line, tug of war, and other games of this type. Our team did pretty well, and the kids had fun. Felipe later told one of the other teachers he had fun, which is pretty high praise for a 7th grade boy stuck in a group full of little girls, playing silly games.

I have a picture here of Diego doing the egg race. Florian, one of my students but on another team, is running the dizzy race. There is our whole team doing tug of war, and my favorite was at the end, with Felipe at the very back, and Alexia and Deborah pulling hard right in front of him.

Even though I had put sunscreen on my face, I had forgotten to do my neck, and I discovered it had gotten quite burned. But I wore my new sunhat that I bought on sale at REI in December (not the most popular time for sunhat purchases) so my scalp didn't get burned, yay!

The kids had a good time, and we got back to school just before lunch. My student's first class after lunch on Fridays is gym, so they got a lot of games that day!

New Puppy!

My host family got a new puppy last night! It's really cute and even pet it and let it put it's paws on me. It is a German Sheperd, and they haven't been able to agree on a name yet. Anyone have any suggestions? Toby and Coby have been vetoed already, Thunder is a possibility. Here are some pictures, one with Jonathan holding the pup.

Hiking on Celaque

I had a very nice Saturday this week. Two of the Peace Corps Volunteers here, Bert and Kalin, invited me on a hike. We decided to hike partway up Celaque, the highest peak in Honduras, which is about a 30 minute drive from downtown Gracias.

We intended to start at 7:30 am, but it was raining pretty hard, so we hung out at their house, playing games, until 10. It had cleared up somewhat by then. We got a ride (with a couple of the medical missionaries in town this week) as far as the road up to the mountain, then we got another ride a good part of the way up that road. Getting rides from strangers (hitchhiking, if you’re gonna get technical) is very normal here, and people are usually quite happy to offer a ride, and I am usually quite happy to accept them up steep roads leading to National Parks.

We walked the rest of the road and into the park. When we got into the park we had to walk up another mile of road to get to the visitors center. We passed a couple from France walking down and had a strange Spanish/French/English conversation with them. We got to the visitors center and started on the trail proper. After about 5 minutes on that trail it was time for a snack break. (We had already hiked over a mile, remember!) We sat down in the misty drizzle and had a snack, and as we were eating, an American family came down the mountain to where we were. The dad is a veterinarian in another city here in Honduras, and his three teenage kids were with him. They were pretty silent teenagers, except the youngest one did tell us he liked pinecones.

After our snack/chat break, we continued on the trail, to discover that they have very recently put up brand new signs with maps and details about each of the 4 trails up the mountain, built a new bridge, and repaired the trail we decided to take. It was pretty impressive.

We took the short hike, because it was still raining pretty hard at times, and it was about lunchtime. We found an orange tree and helped ourselves to some extremely sour oranges. We also explored some ruins, which we think were probably 20 years old. When houses are made of mud bricks, it doesn’t take long to turn to ruins. We crossed some streams and looked at cool plants and took pictures. It was a really neat hike, because everything was wet and the mountain was foggy (it is called a cloud forest, and it really looked like it). The ground had pine needles and deciduous leaves, and everything was beautiful. We had a fun time.

The pictures are of me in the back of the truck that took us up the mountain, Kalin and Bert in the cloud forest, a coffee tree along the trail, and me being very tough in the jungle. : )