Wednesday, April 30, 2014

A Spring Shower


The heat has been oppressive the last few days. It's like a blanket, as my fellow volunteer Emma described it. A big heavy blanket that clings to your skin, weighs down on you head, makes it hard to breath. You start sweating as early as 7 a.m. and lie in bed at night without sheets to the sound of the fan pushing warm air around. The water in the big bucket in our shower feels warm after a day of sitting in the super heated air.

The only thing that brings relief is the rain. It's rained about four times now since the start of the dry season in late February. The heat and heavy humidity are worst just before the rain. This week the pressure built and built unable to find release. In school I felt sapped of energy and just as cranky as the kids. The fans are too loud to have on during class so we bake under the tin roofs of the classrooms, continually wiping the sweat off our faces.

Finally last night we began to see the tell-tale signs of coming rain. The general haziness of the sky had collected itself into a broad grey sheet. The wind picked up and began to set the papaya tree in front of the comedor waving. The kids stood in their lines in front of the comedor for prayer, but were allowed to run off quickly before eating to move their laundry indoors from the laundry lines. Almost all of the young boys and teenagers broke from their lines, whooping and running towards their dorms, caught in the exuberance of the promise of rain and the break of routine. They ran towards and past me as I watched behind the roof of the comedor the wind pick up a cascade of dry leaves and heave them into the air in front of an ever-darkening, billowing sky.

As we finished dinner, the drops started on the roof. Rain here is always loud, filling the rooms with its echo on the metal roofs. The prayer was scarcely audible over the din. When it was over, the kids poured outside, the teenagers standing coolly watching the rain from under the overhanging roof, the little ones screaming and running out into the water. Before long a soccer game had begun, of course, the littlest ones running around the older ones' feet and darting back again under the cover of the roof.

Two of the teenagers leaned jauntily against one of the dorms as the rain fell, watching the general hilarity in the yard in front of the comedor, the pequeños especially relishing the mud, rolling around on the ground, soaking themselves to the skin. "It's as if they've never seen rain before," one remarked disdainfully to the other.

I sat watching the rain come down, loving the feel of the cool wind and the cold rain that blew onto my face. Little Levin, my Levin, came and sat down beside me. "Let's tell stories," he suggested. So we did. He went first, a story about a group of good lions unjustly killed, but in the end somehow they had all come back to life again. He knows I like happy endings. I told one I recycled from a book I had read in the library. In front and around us, the yelling and playing of the other kids made the air noisy. Nearby on the porch where we were sitting were groups of jovenes, teenagers, laughing and talking. But I felt like it was just the two of us, sitting there, enjoying the coolness of the air, the smell of the rain, the freshness of the water and the rapt attention of each other.

I don't often realize how much moments like these mean to me until later when I can't stop thinking about them. There is such richness to my life here. Part of that richness is the sadness of knowing how soon my time will come to an end. C.S. Lewis defined joy as inseparable from a kind of sadness. Joy is all at once a great happiness mixed with the great sorrow of knowing it cannot be grasped or held in place, that it cannot be totally fulfilled here and now. It has a necessary element of loss and longing.

When I say these moments are full of joy for me, I mean it in that sense. The beautiful moments I sometimes share with the kids - of their vulnerability, of my learning to love them, of mutual trust - fill me with joy, a joy that always implies the sadness of the brokenness of their pasts, of their families, of the country they will grow up in and one day need to survive in on their own; the more selfish sadness of my own impermanence.

But joy is joy. Like rain that falls like tears bringing release and relief.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

The Apodo Effect


"He's calling me a nickname!" says Victor, his arm fully extended as he points at Joel his classmate. He's looking at me with an intensely hurt expression that's a warning I understand well: "I'm telling the teacher now, but in about a second I'm gonna hit him." I'm glad Victor, a short 12-year-old built of pure muscle, has chosen this more diplomatic option for now, but I know it's basically inevitable that Joel will get hit, go on using nicknames, and go on being called them by Victor (who's just as guilty truth be told).

The word here for nickname is apodo. It's a useful term; kids use it to talk about the nicknames they have here at the hogar or the ones they use for other people. It's also a negative thing, as it was for Victor that day (every day to be honest). "He's calling me a nickname" in this sense of the word really would translate to English as "He's calling me names." But there's a sense of ownership in it, too; he's not just calling me names, he's calling me my name, the one assigned to me, the one that hurts because it's just mine, and it's kind of true.

Nicknames are an incredibly common part of life for the kids here, and for anyone who comes to live here. Everyone, no exceptions, has a nickname, or seven. It's one of the first of the many idiosyncrasies of the kids' lives here an outsider notices. In some cases a nickname has morphed into the person's everyday name. In others, the apodo is a hated kind of insult, but sticks just the same.

Apodos are, very often, hilarious because they are so accurate. I am always impressed when a new nickname emerges (I've been here to see a few) by the kids' perceptiveness, eye for detail, and crushing accuracy. For example there's a 9-year-old here, a short little ball of a boy. He can be sweet, but he's mostly infamous for picking on the other kids and causing trouble. His nickname is Shrek, the character from the Dream Works movie. I would never have had the ingenuity to invent the name, but with his perpetually shaved head and especially the ears that stick out from its sides, there is something unmistakably Shrek-like about him that's hard to forget once you've heard the name and that draws an immediate laugh of recognition. He hates his nickname. The other pequeños, our younger boys, love to get a rise out of him by calling him his apodo. It always works.

As much as the kids might hate them, I can't help but feel like there's also something to them that means belonging. Being given a nickname means you've been taken in as part of the family. One of the first things that happens to a new kid who arrives is the bestowal of a nickname. Give it a few weeks and the boys will find some oddity of appearance or personality and assign it the perfect name. One of the boys I teach arrived to the hogar in December. He was here for less than a month when the kids found it: zombie. Once again, I never would have found such a fitting word for that whatever-it-is about him. But zombie sort of nails it. He loathes the name. "Don't put apodos" is a constant in my school day.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

The Ups and Downs


Walking back from school today, the cloud of acrid grey smoke followed me. The pit where we burn our trash is all the way on the other side of the school, up a hill, set behind the buildings, but today the wind was not on my side and the cloud had drifted over the three tin-topped buildings of our school to follow me home. There isn't a trash collection infrastructure in Honduras. Everyone burns their own trash. Our school pit has everything in it from scraps of paper, to plastics, to brush and leaves, to (yes it's gross) the papers we toss in the wastebasket after using the toilet (you can't flush paper here, or in most parts of Central/South America). 

Burning trash - the bitter smell of it, the grey smoke - is a common feature of life. We have our own pit behind the volunteer house, and others dot the Amigos property's obscure corners. The smoke drifts over the campus at various points throughout the day. Walking to the nearby village, small fires will be going on the side of the road. While Hondurans keep their own yards and properties meticulously clean and swept, the lack of easy trash disposal means that it's more or less culturally acceptable to throw trash in public places (there are almost never public trashcans to be found anywhere). People commonly leave trash in the road when they walk or throw it out of the windows of cars and buses.

As I continued my walk home from school, gradually the smoke dissipated. I took the back way home, a secluded, tree-draped path through a bit of forest. The path is bounded on one side by a wall of earth, the side of a high hill, and a descent down to a small creek on the other. The walk only takes about 3 minutes, but in that short time I feel like I'm in another place. It's not quiet, but it's not the usual kind of noisy. There are no children to be heard, but the forest hums with insects and strange bird calls and the groaning of the cows in the pasture just past the stream. The trees are covered with tropical oxygen-feeding plants and moss. Today as I walked a new scent filled my nose, a beautiful, intense scent I've only ever experienced here. As I looked down the hill I saw that the usual tangle of green foliage had exploded in tiny white flowers: coffee plants. In the space of a day the flowers had opened, pouring out their sweet perfume. I stood their drinking it in, thinking how beautiful this country is.