Highs, lows

Life is so fast, so slow, so intense, stressful and boring that it is hard to keep up with it. I had so much to write in February, and March has not really been much different except for my level of willingness to reflect upon it. Finally having this willingness today, here is the monthly list:

• As a guest of honor at one of the many local high school pop ballad karaoke contests leading up to the national finals in Tela next month, I sang música de recuerdo (Bésame Mucho, Contigo en la Distancia, and Sabor A Mi) accompanied by my 70-year-old guitar instructor. My act followed that of other group of special invitees who rapped the reggaeton hit “Culo” (the rather lewd Spanish slang for butt, in this case a woman’s very large one). After the competition (in which I was not judged since I was a guest), the high school director smiled and said, “Thank you for your participation. It was really kind of a joke that you sang old music, wasn’t it?”

• A week later, I attended the annual city-wide (again high school level) karaoke contest so popular that thousands of olanchitos attended despite the utterly mediocre entertainment value of the event. It reminded me of Halloween in the Castro in San Francisco: there’s nothing going on but it’s sure fun to stare at 5,000 other well-dressed and attractive people. I borrowed a miniskirt from Sandra and pretended to be 18 again. It worked in a Latin American way: I received the most appreciative and exaggerated comments from strange men that I have ever gotten in my whole life. The comments unfortunately culminated in someone caressing my neck as I was forced to squeeze through a crowd of clamoring young men on my way to the bathroom. I didn’t see who it was, and I didn’t bother to figure it out. I just gave the whole group the finger without looking back. They liked that even more than the miniskirt.

• I was once again led on and once again rejected by my favorite/least favorite 20-year-old. I am still confused. I still have a crush on him. I think one of my unacknowledged hobbies is obsessing over men who are bad for me. Er, boys who are bad for me.

• After a long week in and out of the mayor’s office to stall the second electricity shut-off in one month at the Biblioteca Digital, I succeeded in meeting with, arguing with and finally convincing the entire city commission to continue subsidizing the BD power bill. It was a save-the-day moment which left me feeling both victorious and disappointed that the BD instructors do not have enough self-confidence to fight for their own jobs themselves. My final meeting with the commission made me late to a meeting with the instructors, and when I arrived at the BD for the meeting they yelled at me for not coming on time. I broke down and cried. They were not sympathetic.

• My boss at the national water agency SANAA, where I have all but given up working, has been given the new responsibility of evaluating the municipal water system of La Ceiba. Although he claims to still be the regional director in Olanchito, it’s no secret that this new job in La Ceiba is for the sole purpose of forcing him out of the Olanchito office. It turns out he’s as unpopular with the management in Tegucigalpa as he is with me. The Honduran engineer who is the right-hand-man of the head of all USAID projects in the country visited Olanchito this past week, when I had the opportunity to ask him what USAID’s official word is on who is the boss now. He told me that my favorite engineer Oscar, the young one who arrived in September to salvage the mess here, is now officially in charge of the USAID funding for my projects. I finally have an open door to start working with someone who is motivated, effective, and most importantly, willing to give me resources to make my efforts truly worthwhile at SANAA. Already I was given transportation to visit Piedras de Afilar and Planes last Thursday, where construction is now underway to build the water system I finished designing in September. It is just sad that my last conversation with my now-former boss was him lecturing me on how he is the only non-politically motivated person in the office and how the only thing that matters to him is that the communities get their water systems…followed by an adamant assertion that he is still the regional head and will always be the regional head and a series of blatant lies about the status of my project in Piedras and Planes. He may not be politically motivated, but he is certainly ego-motivated.

• I was invited to spend last Sunday afternoon with Sandra’s family and some church friends in Juncal, an aldea (small town) outside of Olanchito. We rode out in her family’s pickup, her parents in the cab and we seven kids (Sandra, her two younger brothers who still live at home, a cousin, a family friend, Stephanie and me) in the back. I tried to make a joke about Latinos never wasting space in any moving vehicle but of course no one got it. None of them have ever been to the States, where we race down our roads one to a car. When we got to Juncal (the last half kilometer driven on a flat tire), we ate, played cards, danced, took turns riding the poor abused horse someone had ridden to the party, played yard tennis, hit a piñata, and swam in the creek a half mile away. The river was only 3 feet deep, but crowded with people along a 200-foot stretch upstream of where the road crosses it. Well, the road doesn’t actually cross the river, but traffic does, including a bus that parked halfway through to let off bathers with towels as well as half-naked boys with raggedy brooms who proceeded to wash the bus in midstream. As a gringa, especially a gringa with her extremely white legs entirely exposed, the amount of attention I got was overwhelming. I faced it head on. I approached a group of 10-year-olds curiously calling out to the gringa, first chasing them around part of the creek and then stopping and asking every one of the ten of them their names, to which I relegated absolutely zero memory as the asking and not the remembering was the overture of friendship. I started playing games with them in the water, and pretty soon just about all of the three dozen kids in the river were playing with us (the younger ones) or watching us (the adolescent boys). I managed to organize a game of Sharks and Minnows, which they loved although kids randomly joined and dropped out of the game between rounds. They weren’t bothered by the chaos, though, so I wasn’t either. Finally I tired, sat back in the creek up to my neck with Sandra and Stephanie and watched as the boys finally organized their own water game, struggling to stack themselves three-high on each others’ shoulders for about 45 minutes. One little boy sat a person’s width away from me the entire time, just looking at me and lightly splashing water at me occasionally, I guess just to get me to complain at him and remind him that I really was human.