Bananas!

Back in May I went to a banana plantation with friends Noah and Sava. We saw the fields, got a great lecture on the process of growing and harvesting the bananas, then went to the production plant.

There we saw the whole process of quality control and the cleaning and separation between local bananas and ones sent to the US. Before export each bunch of bananas is marked with the plant's number on a sticker, boxed, shipped to port, and taken by boat to the US.

Banana stickers on the plant floor. Plant #4011

Low and behold what do I spy with my little eye at the Sun Prairie grocery store, but bananas from plant #4011!!

Welcome home, bananas!

- Dan

Vacation Pictures

Cloud-covered Volcano Concepcion on Isla de Ometepe.

Anah and I are back from our whirl-wind trip across Costa Rica and Nicaragua. If anyone is interested our photo galleries of the trip are posted here....

Montezuma, Costa Rica (visiting Maria and other parts of the Nicoyla Peninsula)
San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua (up-and-coming surfer town with a great sunset)
Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua (islands formed by twin volcanoes)
Grenada, Nicaragua (colonial city twice burned to the ground, plus a baseball game)
Lake Apoyo, Nicaragua (dormant volcano crater lake)
Masaya, Nicaragua (artisian town and our journey to the top of an active volcano)

Enjoy!

- Dan

And That's All She Wrote....

Tomorrow Anah and I leave Honduras. It's a sad day, but also another start to new adventures.

For the next two weeks Anah and I will be traveling around Costa Rica and Nicaragua. We will return on June 22nd and post all sorts of stories and pictures from our last (for now) Central American adventure.

Wisconsin in various spots around the state will be our home for the summer and then the grand move to Texas will happen in late July/early August.

Stay tuned for "Howdy from Texas"!!!!!!

Earthquake!

Most everyone already has heard the news, but just in case you haven't we had a bit of a shake, rattle, and roll down here in Hondoland. The S,R,and Rs are more commonly referred to as earthquakes and we got hit with a 7.1 one on Thursday morning!

About 2am Anah and I were awoken to an extremely loud rumbling and a spinning bed. It took about 1/2 a second to realize that we were experiencing an earthquake. We sprung out of bed and took off downstairs, fearful that we'd be going down with the rest of the floor. My first thought, once we got to the first floor, was to erroneously lean on my tornado protection knowledge and head for under the stairs. Anah reminded me that we weren't currently experiencing a tornado and the earthquake wouldn't spare us under the steps.

To the door frame! Where are the keys??!?! No lights! Can't find the keys to unlock the door and get out of the house! Hold each other!

OK, quake's over. We manage to find the keys. They were next to the door on top of the TV (not that we could've found them). We unlocked the door and headed out of the house just in case those sneaky aftershocks hit (apparently there would be almost 20 in the next few days... we didn't feel any though). The neighbors were quite chatty, but frankly (and I told them such.. nicely) that I was too scared shitless to try my Spanish right then and there.

Honduras was spared bad damage. Last I heard there were only five deaths and a couple of dozen injuries. No tsunami to report and that was fortunate given the proximity of the quake's epicenter to the coast (about 80km) and surely would have been catastrophic. One bridge took a dive into a river outside of San Pedro, but nothing else prominent to make the news.

Oops.

Small World

Yesterday was the final day of regular classes at the middle school (something that my lovely wife hates me for because she still has another week left). I still have "summer school" for another week, but whatever....

For the last day of classes we had a giant water balloon fight amongst the seventh grades between my geography students and my fellow Wisconsinite teacher Mr. Parisi. Hopefully I can get some pictures up later of all this chaos.

His team was to wear blue and my team was to wear red. Imagine my surprise when one of my students comes walking into my classroom wearing a Wisconsin Badgers t-shirt! His parents own a furniture store in San Pedro and apparently they get a lot of their stuff from Ashley Furniture (the WI-based co.) and the woman that his dad works with in Wisco sent them a bunch of Badger shirts one time.

I think he was pretty proud of the fact the he could show off the Badger colors to me on the last day of school!

- Dan

A Few Pictures from the Lago

This past weekend Anah and I sprinted out of San Pedro Sula and headed south of the city to Lago de Yojoa. Yahoa is the largest lake in Honduras and in the 1970s it was renowed for its bass fishing. Overfishing has since nearly emptied the lake of bass and since then has been replaced by tilapia farms. Honduras is the world's largest producer of tilapia and all of that production takes place on Yojoa.

Here's a few photos from our weekend:

Bird is the word.

Lake.

Horses on the highway (they also ran through our hotel grounds).

Future Honduran Lance Armstrong.

More lake. Yojoa is completely surrounded by moutains, including Honduras' second highest peak.

Nearby pinapple fields. Cool.

Roadside pineapple "stand." $.75 for a whole pineapple! (Note the Gringos walking up... the fat woman had the nerve to want to negotiate a lower price for one... cheapskate!).

Old Man and the Lake.

- Dan

Sweetness!

Last Thursday Anah and I went to a fundraiser for the EIS pre-school. Normally such high-fluting event are not our scene, but it didn't cost that much and we were told there would be food and booze. Count us in.

Social butterflies we are.

The fundraiser was the second year the pre-school had held an auction to raise money for new playground equipment. Various parents put up goods for sale and teachers also auctioned off various services like swim lessons, cooking classes, overnight babysitting, and slumber parties at the school. A creative event.

Attendance was sparse. There are not a ton of kids in the pre-school so the community of support is relatively small, but that would play to our advantage. To my surprise there were a number of soccer-related prizes I quickly found out were up for grabs (besides the soccer camp for me and 10 friends, of course).

In the far corner of the hotel ballroom (big-time scene, people) was what was listed as the "Honduras #1 Fan" package. While I didn't think I'd even qualify to be in the top 1 million for Honduras fans I was none-the-less interested in acquiring this soccer souvenir. The fan pack consisted of a Honduras flag, ball, horn, hat, and the crem-de-la-crem... a national team jersey signed by the entire team. Danny wanty.

Going up against the moneyed elite of the school was going to be a daunting task. Luckily the first phase of the auction night was a "silent" auction, which was a bit ironic given that all of the bids were public and right in front of the items. Needless to say (I think I write that a lot and then proceed to say something... no?) I camped out by the prize pack.

With five minutes to go in the silent auction the low attendance was playing out in my favor. I had the top bid without breaking the bank when another Gringo scrawled his name on the bid sheet. I quick tagged my name another time only for the other gentleman to scribble another bid. I knew if I went higher I would certainly be outbid or, if I did win, would be in trouble for the amount I wrote.

I decided to channel my inner-Mitchell Wiersema, FedEx Global Sales Executive, and negotiate. A brief conversation convened where I was to learn the gent was not that big of a soccer fan, but his wife was pushing to buy loads of stuff (and they would throughout the night). With seconds left in the auction I convinced him to not bid anymore and in another moment of quick thinking offered him another, autograph-less jersey I was winning in exchange for withdrawing his top bid, saving me dozens of dollars in prize package costs. The night was mine!

Victory is mine!

I was now the proud owner of a bunch of Honduras junk, but one, precious autographed national team jersey. Without a doubt I wore that to school the next day and was the envy of many students.


- Dan

Caricature

This deserved a post of its own.

During Spanish Language Day one of the "Spanish Language honorees" was a local political cartoonist, Dario Banegas, who draws for the San Pedro Sula newspaper, La Prensa. According to my principal Mr. Banegas has been honored as the best cartoonist in Honduras several times.

He came to speak to the students as part of one of the class' presentations. When he was done speaking my homeroom kids convinced me that I would be the perfect subject for him to quick draw in front of the whole seventh grade. I've got a lot of good qualities that a caricaturist could capture. Great.

- Dan

More Students

Given that the school year is winding down and I'm feeling particularly bad about the fact that sooner rather than later I will have to tell my kids that I'm not coming back the blog has becoming my avenue for that guilt. Maybe I'll feel a bit better if I post a bunch of pictures from their activities....

Nope, not working.

Anyways, this past Friday the middle hosted Dia de Idioma Espanol or Spanish Language Day. The Spanish classes of each grade put together a day that would honor the heavy hitter of the Spanish language; authors, poets, political cartoonists, and other people and places of Latino importance. The middle school students have a habit of going over the top with display board visual and dressing up and Spanish Language Day was no different.

Pirates and Spanish forts in Omoa, Honduras

Honduran President Mel Zelaya

Honduran musician Guillermo Anderson

"Ugly Betty" star and Honduran, America Fererra

Jesus? I Don't really know.

- Dan

My Students

I just had to share this. Two of my students came in today during my prep period asking if they could use the room to take a few pictures for a school project. "No problem," I say. They proceed to take a number of pictures in a variety of poses for no apparent reason.

"Whatever," I say to myself indifferent to their madness and getting back to my grading.

Not too long ago, apparently pleased with their handiwork, I got this image in the e-mail:


Just in case you're not looking too closely, there are actually only two, unique students in the picture. Who knows what this is for, but still pretty hilarious!

- Dan

Changes

For those of you who take a peak at the Twitter feed to the right of our main posts you may have noticed a number of "tweats" related to Austin and Texas and general nervousness about a wide variety of things. Chances are a number of you already know, but...

if you don't, Anah and I have decided to leave Honduras at the end of the school year. The decision wasn't made lightly and frankly we're really sad to be going.

The thing is as much as we feel rewarded and challenged professionally at school, our personal safety is something we value above all. Recent events in San Pedro have burst the bubble that we erected around us. Without going into specifics, we've just decided that staying in SPS beyond this year would be a risk that we were not willing to take as a couple. With the economic depression going global, a serious escalation in violence in Honduras, and the potential for political instablity (elections are this fall...who knows what?) we didn't want to return and then have to leave in a hurry.

Either way after June 6th we are out of Honduras, we'll travel to Costa Rica and Nicaragua on our Central American Farewll Tour and then a new adventure begins...

Anah and I are going to be moving to Austin, Texas later in the summer. After taking with a lot of friends, doing a bunch of research, and throwing darts at a map we've decided that giving the South a shot would give us the sense of security we crave without sacrificing the sense of adventure we sought when we went abroad.

This past weekend, we travelled with Noah and Jenny to Austin for two teacher job fairs to get a feel for the market in Austin. We are cautiously optimistic that for next fall we'll both be teaching in the Austin-area.

Right now we have few answers and tons of questions about what's next, but the most certain thing we do know is that nothing is more important than each other and our safety (real or imagined) and nothing else trumps that committment to protect each other. Whether or not Austin is the best move remains to be seen...

Stay Tuned.

Earth Day

Last week the middle school had a bunch of activities set up for the kids to promote Earth Day. Students watched the Dr. Seuss movie, The Lorax, heard from Honduran about the importance of protecting the environment (it helped that he brought a snake!), and screen printed t-shirts.

Snakes make learning more fun!

Dumping out a day's worth of school trash to show the kids.

As you'll notice in the following pictures there is a funny little cartoon guy featured on the shirts. That is our Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Kramer, who is a pretty big recycling, Earth guy. The kids get a kick out of him because he's a bit of an odd duck. Anyways... I went ahead and kinda turned him into a icon at the school by making the design for the t-shirt. He didn't mind and the kids thought it was pretty funny. The "WWMKD?" stands for "What Would Mr. Kramer Do?" and he's saying "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!"



- Dan