Mission: Possible

Feeling grateful for Pepto Bismol

Day three waking up in Honduras and the gang is starting to experience the unsettling effects a few days in a developing nation can have on your digestion. Luckily, we came prepared with Pepto Bismol.

After downing a few cups of coffee each, we walk the five minutes or so to the elementary school down the dirt path. This school teaches kindergarten through sixth grade and is slightly more privileged than the first kindergarten school. Well, privilege is all relative in Lepaera, but most children have shoes that fit, lunches to eat, and all students are donning a crisp uniform.

Last night, during the group’s downtime, our resident engineer (well, not precisely) from Montana, Ben Fosland, patiently described to the rest of us his brilliant idea for installing the razor wire.

Some chisel, some teach

Installation of the razor wire begins under the watchful eye of neighborhood boys.

First, the boys had to chisel wells in the wall to expose the embedded rebar poles. While they chiseled the length of the wall, the girls were put in charge of Profe’s classroom for the morning. She left us with the task of seeing to their drawing lesson.

Thankfully, Lindsay Arnold, an artist in our midst, took charge and began doodling on the whiteboard. When the children began to noticeably lose interest in drawing, we played several rounds of hangman with them. At first, the words were school-related (they were currently studying biology), but they quickly digressed to pop culture names. “Shakira” was a huge hit.

Eventually, the games of hangman could no longer hold the interest of the children so we surrendered to their requests for an early recess. We took them out to the school’s courtyard and played a few rounds of “pato pato ganzo” (duck duck goose) and ultimately settled on a game of soccer. Around noon, we checked on the boys’ progress and decided to leave for lunch at the house. Lunch was our favorite dish: arroz con pollo! Everyone had seconds and some even went back for thirds. The Carias family really takes care to ensure that we are well fed, which sometimes borders on overfed.

After lunch, the boys get back to the chiseling. This was all done by hand with a stake and mallet. They rotated chiselers every couple of feet because of the extensive length of the walls and the exhausting effect of repetitive chiseling.

A name to remember

The girls were put in charge of designing, painting, and decorating a sign for the front of the school. Up until this time, none of us knew the exact name of the school because there was no signage anywhere.  Profe sought to change this and she gave us creative license to do so. Although she wanted to give us unbridled liberty in this project, the name of the school had to be emblazoned largely and correctly – “Escuela Urbana Mixta de Manuel Bonilla.”

We took great pains to get this right and Profe readily approved. Having nine girls working on the sign at any one time would have created a “too many cooks in the kitchen” type situation, so the girls divided ourselves into two groups: stencilers and cementers. The three stencilers broke off from the group and set up shop in Profe’s classroom to cut out perfectly sized stencils used for the lettering on the sign.

Magdalena was there to help and also to keep her cell phone on her so that she could call Profe with any of our questions. The rest of the girls sought to mixing cement. After the boys exposed the rebar poles, they used regular wire to tie a much longer piece of rebar to it so that the rebar together stands approximately 12 inches above the top of the wall. It was the girls’ job to mix cement and cover the part where the two pieces of rebar were tied together.

Enjoying the hot springs

Mixing cement in Honduras is quite a task. The precise formula was a little touch-and-go at first because it encompasses water (which needed to be fetched in buckets), cement, and loose gravel lying around the school. After a few experiments, the cementers had the recipe down pat and began the messy task of filling the holes in the wall.

Around 5 p.m., we all headed home and were extra thrilled because tonight we got to go to the “termales del rio” (hot springs)! Carias and his family love to take us to the hot springs. Profe had slaved making homemade tamales all day and loaded them up in a cooler and brought them to the hot springs. All of us piled into the two vehicles, including Peace Corps Volunteer Darren and the entire Carias clan.

The hot springs are always a much-anticipated part of the trip because it’s the first real chance we have to feel any sort of clean. The water is very hot and helps to both relax the overworked muscles (I mean, for most us, we had been spending weeks in the library and manual labor was definitely a change of pace) and to wash away dirt, turpentine, and the ever-elusive blue paint.

Amoeba alert

After a dinner of the most delicious tamales ever made, we got a chance to learn about the brand-spanking new water treatment plant located at the top of the mountains in Lepaera. It is the largest water treatment plant in all of Honduras. The plant consists of mainly sand filters, which actually filter out everything imaginable with the exception of amoebas. Amoebas are the “bugs” that cause non-natives to get very sick if they drink the town’s water and are the primary source of dysentery. It’s actually quite simple to kill the amoebas – just add a few drops of chlorine (“cloro”) and you’re good to go. Chlorine is very inexpensive and quite effective at cleaning the entire water supply; however, the locals do not want their water to be chlorinated.

The chlorination makes the locals very sick because it actually kills the “bugs,” or amoebas, already in their system from years of drinking the ground water.  There is a campaign led by the Governor to chlorinate the water to make it healthier; yet it is met with much resistance. Most of the people would prefer to not get sick from the chlorination and to keep drinking amoeba-infested water like they have been doing for years.

Another benefit of the new water treatment plant is running water during the day! Last year, the whole town shut off the water supply daily during the hours of approximately 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. This was to conserve the water resources. But, now that there is a plant atop the mountains, the water in Lepaera runs consistently at all hours, which means one thing in particular – flushing toilets!

A couple of hours after dark, the whole waterlogged gang piled back into the cars and we drove the 30 minutes or so back to the house. The hot springs were a well-deserved treat before the long day of work ahead.