Saturday in Olanchito

Today I woke up at 6:45 am, without an alarm since it was sunny this morning. I got out of bed half an hour later. I read the latest (mid-October) edition of Newsweek sent by the main office while eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a glass of lemonade spiked with anti-dehydration salts (still sick). Encouraged by the sunshine, I threw all my dirty shirts into the larger of my plastic laundry tubs, and at the last minute remembered to test the water in the faucet to see if it was suitable for doing laundry. A greater or lesser degree of mud has been running through the plumbing due to all the rain. Today the water only had a few stick and leaf particles and no suspended clay, so I ran the water into the tub with some powdered laundry soap and left the shirts to soak. The next errand was to go to the market and buy some vegetables. I have only eaten Ramen and Cheerios since I got sick on Wednesday morning, and have barely wanted to eat even that, so waking up this morning resolved to get better meant going to the market would be critical. I dressed more appropriately and walked the two blocks to the main street through town where the market is located. I bought what I still consider to be a huge bag of green, red, purple, white, orange, yellow and brown edibles; I still don’t understand how I manage to eat all of them in a matter of half a week except that I’m pretty much off sandwiches (latino friends of the world celebrate!) and have been getting more creative at lunchtime.

I got a lot of piropos on the way to and from the market, though I was dressed rather shabbily compared to the typical Honduran on the street on a Saturday when everyone is parading their tightest and shiniest. I finally figured out that it was the way I was walking. I bought a new pair of sandals in La Ceiba last week and they hurt as I’m breaking them in, so I walk with Chinese-like mincing steps that tend to make my butt move a lot more than my usual walk. This must explain my latino friends’ attraction to Asian women. I wonder if foot-binding was ever popular in this country?

Finally 9 am arrived, the hour at which everything behind a storefront opens, so I biked to the pharmacy and bought sunscreen for an exorbitant price (my arms are no longer white, but the color of my face approximates the tan on a boiled crab) and then biked to the doctor. He’s getting to be a good friend of mine. He prescribed me three medications after listening to my stomach bubbling away with his stethoscope, I think mainly to rip off the Peace Corps who foots the bill rather than out of my real necessity for all of them. My favorite anti-parasite medicine was in the collection and I immediately started taking it.

Feeling optimistic about the weather as it was still sunny 3 hours after waking up, I biked back to my apartment to finish washing my shirts and do the rest of my laundry at the pila. I finished an hour later and then sat in my apartment to rest before making lunch of leftover rice, guacamole with crackers and lemonade with anti-dehydration salts. My landlord’s little red Bug pulled into the courtyard and I went over to her apartment to pay the rent. I explained to her that I now have a leak in my bedroom, and also could she please sent the machete-guy to cut back the lovely-but-becoming-monstrous flowering tree in my backyard that is prevent sunlight from coming into my bedroom and promoting the uninhibited growth of mold. She said of course, she would have both things taken care of today. I’ll ask her about them again next week.

As for the rest of the afternoon…it has started raining and I had to take all my wet laundry in. Hopefully it will be sunny tomorrow morning and I can put it all out again then. Meanwhile, I am watching plenty of Hondurans biking and walking down my street in the rain, but four years of living in the desert means I’m still afraid of getting wet and I would rather sit in my apartment and wait it out. Which makes for a good excuse to listen to my new bachata CD on repeat and to write a blog entry.