Sunday, April 6, 2008

La Moskitia, Fin


Our arrival left us with a great sense of relief. We were in a small tropical town called Brus Laguna. One of the guys from Tegucigalpa was born there, and we all stayed in a hostel that his family runs. They bent over backwards to serve us, especially during the meals: typical Honduran beans and rice and platano, but with big bowls of shrimp. They even went out and shot a buffalo for us (which they pronounced boofalo), and we ate it practically three meals a day. We also chopped open coconuts to drink every day.
I woke up Sunday morning at 4:45 to church bells. I can't imagine that the service was actually beginning. I think the bells were significant in some aspect of holy week. We did make it to church that morning, but after breakfast and some hammock time. The church was clean and white, with green, yellow, and red ribbons, and palm branches were scattered on the floor. The service jumped between Spanish and the local language, Miskito. The Bibles and hymnals were all in Miskito, and the children's choir sang the Beatles' Let It Be in their native tongue. The women wore head coverings. The service felt increasingly hot and uncomfortable, and the wooden pews squeaked as people began to fidget.
On Monday, we left on lanchas again to the family's farm, Bella Vista.
How far away? I asked.
Close, they replied.
I've heard this before. The boat ride was three hours long, but incredibly scenic. We passed through more tight canals, and then into the choppy lagunas. We passed small canoes with men paddling bananas and coconuts back to town. We landed on an absolutely deserted muddy coast with small shrubs and tall grasses. The farm was about 3,000 acres, but this is difficult to say for sure; I wonder if there are actually property lines, or if it is all just empty, uninhabited land? That night was, in Moritz Thomsen's words, 'furiously beautiful'. The horizon was smudged orange with fires. The moon was out, and we walked out to a swamp to spot crocodiles. With a flashlight, their eyes have a red glint, and they don't move at all. One of the farmers took a noose to catch one, but was never successful. The crocodile always zipped off.
Within minutes of walking back, it began to pour. Evidently, getting wet was unavoidable on this trip. We had a tarp set up with mosquito nets strung beneath. I slept fitfully that night, because I was wet, and the storms moved in and out dramatically. There was a consistent drizzle, with intermittent sheets of rain and thunder. Rain funnelled down from the tarp as if in gutters, and into our shoes and clothes.
I woke early that morning, put on my Chacos and went to the little mud hut kitchen. The women worked inside in darkness, and they revolved around a pan with a wood fire. They gave me a cup of coffee, and I went out through a strip of coconut trees. The morning was still trying to push through the sluggish cloudcover like a yawn that just won't come. I found a group of men milking cows, and they told me to bring my cup over. They filled it up with raw milk, which is warm and frothy. It is primarily a dairy farm, and they make cheese, since there is no refrigeration, and milk wouldn't survive the long ride back to Brus Laguna. For meals at the farm, they served us big squares of crumbly cheese to go with our beans and rice. Not the best food, but at the time it felt so solid and elemental. Like vitamins, it goes down with a satisfying gulp.
On our last day in Brus Laguna, we met up with the health director of the community. She gave us a tour of a neighborhood and introduced children who had medical problems that could not be fixed without outside intervention. She said the AIDS rate in the region was 45%, but the effects haven't set in yet. There's much work to be done. I don't have much more to say about this now, except that it makes teaching English seem unimportant.
We stayed up late that night, playing soccer on concrete courts and drinking our last coconuts. We got up at 5 a.m. in the morning, stuffed our bags full, and went to the dock to meet our boat. Just as the world at Brus Laguna appeared for us a few days before, it was now setting beneath swampy forest as we sailed away.

Every step that we took away from Siguatepeque was just another step to be retraced, another dot on the map that we would pass through again. A mirror image bent around five days. And I realize that my time here in Honduras is just a number of steps from home. I am waiting, waiting with the patience of those long, wet boat rides, to retrace my steps back home. The school year is closing quickly (9 weeks and counting), and then Siguatepeque will disappear on the horizon, too.

The ride home was different, in fact. I got quite dehydrated since we had no water, and came down with a fever and chills. At first I thought I had malaria, which I was happy to not experience.

Here's the link to the photos again-
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2129838&l=f7019&id=29705820