well breezy it has been over the last 10 days as i sorta led a groupo gringos on a service trip, mostly high school kids from a boarding school in the NE and a few adults. beautiful and fascinating, at times inspiring and at times more in the manner of say a week old dead and rotting elephant seal on a pristine beach.
now i pèrsonaly would never shell out a grand to go and slave away for a week, but i can understand that not everyone is up for jumping out and hoping the chute opens. and they get to see some beautifully remote places, full of happy kids who for the most part go to school for 4 hrs a day till they are 16 or dont feel it anymore and then go get knocked up repeatedly. plant some corn n beans, eat some corn n beans, make babies that will plant and eat more corn n beans, play a bit of soccer, its not bad. 4 year old kids walking around freely, in rubber boots a bit too large, happy kids, laid back town, no alcohol there so people are good, hardworking, and really mellow. one guy in town sports the full length straight chops and a thick handlebar mustache, always smiling, everybody missing lots of teeth, but, other than a general lack of dental care, seemingly a carefree way to while away the days. they got some slowly running water a few hours a day and no electricity but they may someday.
so the project i was working on had a taste of zen, as it involved tearing up a badly made concrete floor in a church and pouring a new one. then they ran out of sand so i got to switch to working on building an adobe classroom at the ngo´s demo farm. have people pay to come down and do your work, gotta love that. the other one involved building a cistern or somethign to catch water from a spring. mostly hauling sand and cement and the like.
well at the momento my cabeza is feeling a bit funny, was a bug passing around and i got it. not too bad but right now i seems to have lost most ability to regulate body temp, so i am wearing a fleece jacket and its far from cold. but, this brings me to a valuable lesson: the shits, 101. so, lets say all of a sudden you come down with the shizziles, what to do? while your instinct may be to reach out and grab the immodium you must resist. many of the gringos on the trip did that and promptly spent the rest of the day yakking. you see your body is reacting to the bugs waging the guerilla war inside your gut by flushing them out, and if you clog up the downward path, things only got one way to go. so give it a day, or two, and as you start to get better perhaps take some.
well i think people may show up soon ( i live at the office, which is actually in a house, in a back room) so i better put on some clothes, spiff up and the like.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
the barber
went and got a haircut around the corner yesterday. the barber turns out to also be a sensei. needless to say he cuts a mean head of hair. tho he got the sideburns uneven.
off to the sticks tomorrow for 10 days. purportedly to plan out some test plots for the jatropha plantations, but really i am quite sure that they just need an extra hand taking care of a group of do-gooder types coming down to help fix things.
back at the beach sunday i went for a kayak ride on a piece of shit sit on top, and a beagle swam out a good 50 feet, totally of his own accord, jumped onboard, and rode around for a while. took some waves and everything. cool dog.
off to the sticks tomorrow for 10 days. purportedly to plan out some test plots for the jatropha plantations, but really i am quite sure that they just need an extra hand taking care of a group of do-gooder types coming down to help fix things.
back at the beach sunday i went for a kayak ride on a piece of shit sit on top, and a beagle swam out a good 50 feet, totally of his own accord, jumped onboard, and rode around for a while. took some waves and everything. cool dog.
Monday, June 12, 2006
free beer
got some free beer last nite, thanks to a paunchy guy in a yellow shirt. Im pretty sure he was chasing the gaunt fellow in the white shirt, though it was hard to say for sure. definitely possessing a rather large gun that could have been some kind of shortened shotgun, but once again hard to say even though i would get to see it up close.
it was abt 10pm and 4 of us had been sitting around for about a bit. heard a shot, not too close, but not too far, causing me to glance over my left shoulder, whereupon about 200 feet away a guy in a white shirt comes flying out of the shadows, tumbles on the beach and sprawls out, looking to be doing much the type of thing one might do after being shot. so without much hesitation i jump up, spit out "its time to go", which probably didnt help the mexican guy and the puerto rican girl with us, tho they figured it out quick enough, and promptly scoot behind the building with a heading towards the road. but right then rounding the corner of the building coming straight at me is none other than a gaunt fella in a white shirt, so thinking its best to avoid the company i spin around, run and dive behind a fishing panga, for lack of anything better to do. then comes the paunchy guy in a yellow shirt with the large gun that could have been a shotgun poking around, and seeing me more or less cowering behind the boat seems to think for a minute whilst pointing his gun most aggressive like, and motions me up. so surely we were all getting done off and/or robbed i assumed but nothing like, he just points at the road and doesnt say much, so we took that as our cue to leave and promptly did so without paying our tab and so we got some free beer.
the weekend until then was a fairly relaxed affair spent at the beach of omoa, mostly in the hammock and with the company of interesting strangers. the beach was covered in a fairly impressive amount of crap, mostly plastic and driftwood but including a whole banana tree with bananas. found me a scorpion in the shower, met an interesting australian going to nursing school in mexico for a year, a mexican whale shark biologist, and a puerto rican gypsy type traveling solo, an older german database designer settled down in a remote part of honduras, and a few fairly benign americans surfing their way back home.
working on database no. 2, which is a bitch. no 1 was easy. beginners luck.
it was abt 10pm and 4 of us had been sitting around for about a bit. heard a shot, not too close, but not too far, causing me to glance over my left shoulder, whereupon about 200 feet away a guy in a white shirt comes flying out of the shadows, tumbles on the beach and sprawls out, looking to be doing much the type of thing one might do after being shot. so without much hesitation i jump up, spit out "its time to go", which probably didnt help the mexican guy and the puerto rican girl with us, tho they figured it out quick enough, and promptly scoot behind the building with a heading towards the road. but right then rounding the corner of the building coming straight at me is none other than a gaunt fella in a white shirt, so thinking its best to avoid the company i spin around, run and dive behind a fishing panga, for lack of anything better to do. then comes the paunchy guy in a yellow shirt with the large gun that could have been a shotgun poking around, and seeing me more or less cowering behind the boat seems to think for a minute whilst pointing his gun most aggressive like, and motions me up. so surely we were all getting done off and/or robbed i assumed but nothing like, he just points at the road and doesnt say much, so we took that as our cue to leave and promptly did so without paying our tab and so we got some free beer.
the weekend until then was a fairly relaxed affair spent at the beach of omoa, mostly in the hammock and with the company of interesting strangers. the beach was covered in a fairly impressive amount of crap, mostly plastic and driftwood but including a whole banana tree with bananas. found me a scorpion in the shower, met an interesting australian going to nursing school in mexico for a year, a mexican whale shark biologist, and a puerto rican gypsy type traveling solo, an older german database designer settled down in a remote part of honduras, and a few fairly benign americans surfing their way back home.
working on database no. 2, which is a bitch. no 1 was easy. beginners luck.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
oi
the title comes from a comment by some gringo baloney head when ben and i pulled up, somewhere in baja, at the end of one solid hell raising morning where shrimp boats been hiding behind islands. we thought it funny then and i still do. and the flying squirrel shit comes from an ingredient in a chinese pain medicine that an acupuncturist gave me a lil while back. shit works, relives stagnation.
today i went on an expedition to the super-mega-gigantic-check-your-soul-at-the-door-grocery store in the hope of finding exotic tropical tingems and some vegetables. not too much on the exotic scene but i got some lettuce and some kraft italian dressing, so not half bad. i walked there and got a good buzz off the exhaust fumes.
apparently there is a lot of crime here. i didnt exactly believe it at first- seems like a pretty normal place, or just like the hood in dc which seems normal enough. right when i got here i was sitting in the garage/porch with the fence/bars unlocked and the neighbors came by and said i should lock up cause there are theives running around. my mom always said the same thing and if youve seen where i live there isnt anything running around there except deer, and if they are on two legs they´re coming in regardless. but everything here is barred in, stores, houses, some even throw some razor wire in for effect plus a good dose of big mean dog thrown in, and i guess for good reason. lily, a most wonderful person i work with, gave me the helpful tip to walk in the middle of the street, as its purportedly safer than the sidewalks. and with the way people drive, thats really saying something. well turns out the lunch spot done got stuck up on monday, kinda funny really the way they did it, they just walked in and shut the metal security gate so noone could leave and took everybodys shit, watches, cell phones, everything, and then walked away.
anyways i´ve taken to dodging cars and walking in the middle of the street. i fortunately am about a foot taller than everyone else here so i put on a mean face (really=) and so far been doing ok.
otherwise the radio here is great, the best thing i brought w me by far. life is interesting, hot, sticky, far enough away not to worry about too much, which is nice.
g
today i went on an expedition to the super-mega-gigantic-check-your-soul-at-the-door-grocery store in the hope of finding exotic tropical tingems and some vegetables. not too much on the exotic scene but i got some lettuce and some kraft italian dressing, so not half bad. i walked there and got a good buzz off the exhaust fumes.
apparently there is a lot of crime here. i didnt exactly believe it at first- seems like a pretty normal place, or just like the hood in dc which seems normal enough. right when i got here i was sitting in the garage/porch with the fence/bars unlocked and the neighbors came by and said i should lock up cause there are theives running around. my mom always said the same thing and if youve seen where i live there isnt anything running around there except deer, and if they are on two legs they´re coming in regardless. but everything here is barred in, stores, houses, some even throw some razor wire in for effect plus a good dose of big mean dog thrown in, and i guess for good reason. lily, a most wonderful person i work with, gave me the helpful tip to walk in the middle of the street, as its purportedly safer than the sidewalks. and with the way people drive, thats really saying something. well turns out the lunch spot done got stuck up on monday, kinda funny really the way they did it, they just walked in and shut the metal security gate so noone could leave and took everybodys shit, watches, cell phones, everything, and then walked away.
anyways i´ve taken to dodging cars and walking in the middle of the street. i fortunately am about a foot taller than everyone else here so i put on a mean face (really=) and so far been doing ok.
otherwise the radio here is great, the best thing i brought w me by far. life is interesting, hot, sticky, far enough away not to worry about too much, which is nice.
g
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