First Week and a Day

(First impressions on life and work in La Ceiba)

As expected, our first week of life in La Ceiba has been really interesting. A lot of our time has been spent getting settled, but with two jobs each we’ve had to dive into work right away since we are both trying to create good first impressions. The pace of life is definitely different than back home. We have complete control over when and for how long we want to work… also of what we want to work on. For the most part, we have been going to work at about 10 in the morning and have arranged it so we can go with each other to work at least some of the time. We are usually home at about four in the afternoon. We’ve spent a lot of our time buying groceries… we have gone to the supermarket four times in these past 8 days plus two times to the produce market. Since we have to walk to the supermarket (it is about a mile away from our house), we can only buy what we can carry in our hands. That added to the fact that we are eating all meals at home everyday and we end up eating the little we buy really quickly. It’s been cool cooking everything from scratch every day, and starting this week, we are planning with our roommates to take turns cooking dinner for each other. I am really excited to learn some new dishes, and to cook for more than just two people. There’s a lot of restaurants in La Ceiba, even some fast food places (Burger King, Church’s, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut) but our new budget does not allow us to eat out as much as we used to in Bethesda or Winter Haven.

As far as work goes, we’ve both tried to spend a good amount of time with our counterparts to create a good impression at the beginning. We’ve also tried to spend some time at each other’s work to set the expectations that we are here to work as a team and not necessary as individuals. This is especially important to us, because two of our counterparts require that we go on multiple day trips, and we would like to go together on those as much as possible. The more we find out about our work the more excited we get. There’s the obvious coolness of the work at the Cayos Cochinos, but Max’s work with Madera Verde (the artisan group) also sounds really cool. For instance, he will be working with remote aldeas in the mountains, where a lot of the people are of Pech descent (one of Hondura’s indigenous ethnic groups). They live right in the middle of the jungle in places people don’t visit often. Some we would have to get there by cayuco (a dugout canoe). We are really looking forward to meeting those people and getting to know those amazing sounding places.

The city of La Ceiba is like nothing else in Honduras. You sometimes forget this is a developing country. There are wide roads, comfortable side walks, beautiful homes, a mall, and many other amenities. There are also a lot of expatriates and tourists around all the time. Every now and then you are reminded this is still Honduras tough, like the other day when power kept going out at different areas of the mall, or the two times we’ve had power outages in the house, or the unpaved roads. Of course we wouldn’t even dare complain to our Peace Corps friends who are living without running water, power, and have lots of spiders and scorpions as their roommates.

In town, we visited a place called La Línea where they sell baleadas (a local dish that is usually made with refried beans, eggs, a spicy sauce, and wrapped in a flour tortilla). These baleadas are famous in the whole country for their tasty sauce and for the fact that they are sold in stands in the middle of the road. You can sit on a bench as cars drive past you on either side of the road, some even stop to grab some baleadas to go. The baleadas really lived up to our expectations and a guy serenading us with his guitar added a bohemian touch to the night. We also went for drinks at a little restaurant/bar owned by a French guy and his Honduran wife. We met the beautiful wife who had just had a baby two months ago (I was in shock of how skinny she was after just having had a baby). They have a full bar (something rare in Honduras) and a nice menu of local and international dishes (including a Spanish omelet). We really liked the place and plan to spend a lot of evenings there having drinks and chatting with the regulars.

At the French bar, we met a couple of Hondurans that we really liked a lot. Carlos is the head of the computer engineering department in the local university, and his girlfriend Samara is a fun loving law student. We signed up to be part of a panel of “experts” to grade the projects and presentations of the computer engineering students, poor Max was all stressed when they all started calling him Ingeniero Max Wilson (Engineer) (titles are really important here) and were making a big fuss about his education in the states. We realized a little too late the huge responsibility we had signed up for… give the students the final grade that would determine if they passed or not the class. It was particularly stressful when, at the end of each presentation, the professor would call out the name of every participant and announce to the whole class the grade we had given them and if they were passing the class or not. Luckily for the students, and us, they all passed. The day after, we invited Carlos and Samara over for drinks (they loved my newly invented peach nectar rum drinks) and then went out dancing in town. They took us to a bar right on the beach where they bought buckets of beer for us (they literally sell buckets full of ice and bottles of beer) and we danced to the beat of reggaetón (a very popular type of Latin hip-hop) until four in the morning (yes, even Max stayed up that late and danced). Sunday was spent resting after such a “busy week”.

There’ve also been some stresses, mainly about the amount of work ahead of us. We are worried about falling into the trap of working too much, and living the same fast paced life we had in the city (of course this would be a much more beautiful place and a lot less pay). I’ve also been worried that living in such a huge, beautiful house might create the wrong impression in the poor people we are here to help; last thing we’d want is for that to make it harder for us to connect with them. Of course it would be hard to drag Max away from the comforts of wireless high-speed internet, washer and dryer, and a bar across the street. We will see how it goes, and we’ll take it one day at a time. For now I am going to join him in the hammocks on the terrace where he’s enjoying the beautiful thunderstorm that is falling, lit by candle light since power is gone today, too…