It just gets better

If I could choose to live only the most perfect moments of the past two weeks, these are what they would be:

*Organizing and leading a series of meetings between the instructors of the public computer lab (my main project right now) and a group of local university students who are equipping the lab with Internet as part of a required community service project. The purpose of these meetings has been to strengthen the partnership between the university and the computer lab for the longer-term benefit of both parties. For the first time, I have had the chance to fully and directly use my professional abilities, in this case group motivation and management skills developed during the course of my hydrology career back in the States, in the context of my work here in Honduras. I am facilitating the connection of groups that, for lack of a person with these abilities, would otherwise take only passing interest in each other. More importantly, I am teaching these skills: I serve as a role model when I lead a meeting, I keep all of the instructors involved in every level of the meeting-development process, and I directly explain my strategy to them before each meeting and require their participation. I am finally starting to understand how to match opportunities to use and teach my skills with the true needs (and not just desires or theorized needs) of the people I work with.

*Receiving a phone call from my favorite engineer at the SANAA office, Oscar, telling me that he is in the process of taking over management of the water projects I have been working on. The main reason I have been doing little water project work since November is out of a desire to avoid the technically competent but controlling and manipulative senior engineer who has managed me in the past. I now have hope that I can continue doing my very interesting and necessary work on rural water systems in a less hostile work environment.

*Ending the most frustrating relationship of my life with the least angry and most appreciative breakup of my life. Post-breakup, things are more complicated again, but at least the moment was good. And I am eating again.

*At the annual patron-saint festival in the small town of Agalteca on the edge of Olanchito, admiring an athletic, intelligent bay stallion being directed through a series of delicate steps by his rider… and the rider dismounting and telling me to get on. No questions asked. He just let me go in the middle of the fairgrounds with his horse. His stallion. Named Fuego. Fuego behaved beautifully but felt barely containable beneath me. He reminded me of why the flames of my horse obsession burned far beyond my preteen years, although I had little time to ride once I left junior high. Fuego will be my new boyfriend, if only I can find him again. I was too shy, too grateful or perhaps too smitten to ask the owner’s name when I dismounted.

*At a carne asada dinner after the festival, being served mistela, a traditional homemade liquor made of boiled dulce (unrefined sugar), clove, cinnamon and who knows what else…that tastes strikingly like Jagermeister. This is a good thing since I love Jagermeister and it is impossible to find in this country. Even better, it was poured into my glass out of what appeared to be a reused antifreeze container.

*Meeting a new gringo in town at the street market while shopping for a skirt. He qualifies as gringo because he was born and raised in San Diego, but this gringo is half Honduran and half Cuban and has lived in at least three different countries in the past decade. He is my age. He owns four tattoo parlors in southern California. He is living in Olanchito to hang out with his mother’s family. Hanging out seems to include sitting around with his aunt and uncle and cousins on their half-block of street-side storefronts, cooking chicharrón con yuca and doing construction. He is a walking stand-up comedy routine, given that he really likes to talk and is animated in the exaggeratedly expressive latino way even when he speaks in English. He has only been here a month so far. I can’t wait to introduce him to my sitemate so we can all go party at the bar together.