Dentists and Doughnuts

How does a simple trip to the dentist turn into drinking wine with misionaries?
In the magical world of Honduras, all of your dreams can suddenly come true....

As Crystal mentioned below, ( if ya havent read her post yet, go check it out! I'll wait here!) I've been in Tegus since yesterday, taking care of a broken tooth (turned out to be minor) issued to me by some beans, so don't believe all this propaganda in the media about basic grains and their peaceful ways, cuz it ain't so. Dentist appt went rather smooth: the ability to afford dental care is obviously a luxury here, and in response the dentist office is kinda a swank place, this particular office was in the same building as the Columbian Embassy and the Standard Fruit (Dole) Office. She was very nice, spoke english when necessary, and gave me a cleaning and a patch job on the spot. However, she thinks that i might have.....(bum bum bummmmm) Gingivitis!! If I was on a tv commercial for toothpaste, the lighting would be ominous and i would would looked simply shocked, and accompanied by an echo (gingivitis.....gingivitis...........gingivitis), but she gave me some new toothpaste and I should be on the road to gum health soon. Thanks medical insurance!!

Crystal and I are broke as a joke right now, which made this trip to tegus bittersweet: I could eat whatever i wanted, go to a movie, and even go grocery shopping for exotic delights such as peanut butter and black pepper, if only i could afford them. More likely i was gonna eat some cupcakes for dinner and tough the night out. However, I was destined to remain in my hotel room and watch tv cuz its free. It was my one chance to watch the winter olympics, but the only event for the entire night was figure skating. NOOOO! was my desperate plea: Give me the luge, curling, ice hockey, anything but women's iceskating! However, I was saved from this fate by our pals Dave and Dez, who just so happened to be in Tegus as well. We went out to a really good cuban restaurant and had some beers courtesy of my credit card. We met two guys back at the hotel who we thought were old pc volunteers, but later found out to be missionaries. Typically this is not the social company I tend to keep, but they proved to be lacking in the brainwashed department, and simultaneously well stocked in the Mexican Tequila department.

We talked politics, passed arround their guitar, and spoke of my favorite peace corps urban legend: The Crazy Girl Who Makes Doughnuts. Lore has it that there was a volunteer who lost her marbles while in her village for peace corps, and proceeded to make doughnuts with her every free moment. This activity went on unchecked and beknownst to PC for a while, until they randomly visited her, and were soon overcome by the presence of doughnuts on every available surface in her house. This led to her being sent back to the states as a crazy person. The location of this story is always a mystery; people here claim it was in Honduras, but our sitemate Sidney first heard it when he was a volunteer in Nepal, where it was also supposed to have taken place. However, we were able to find out last night from our missionaries that this story has been arround since at least the first time they lived in Honduras, some 15 years prior. It also proved to be the inspiration for Sidney's business project that we have been working on and has been the most sucessful of our projects to date: a doughnut company to raise money for youth activities.

Therefore, with shiny teeth, I'll be heading back up to Vegas today, Crystal and I need to get ready to host some trainees this weekend, they are visiting to see what the peace corps experience is all about. The will want to know about the struggles, the accomplishments, the adjustments, the true essence and grit of what an actual volunteer is and what they really do. And they will see the full embodiment of being a peace corps volunteer on Friday, for we are all gonna make Doughnuts.

Back to School.

1. School officially started today. No back to school specials here, just a stand on the side of the road with pencils, backpacks, uniforms and notebooks. Our friend, who is a teacher, told us last night that he only had 2 students yesterday because alot of them are still picking coffee. This should hopefully be done by March. This also means, being youth volunteers, we will soon be heading out to work. I´ll be teaching Music Appreciation at one school and working with a couple bands at 2 other schools. The beisbol tournament is in 2 weeks and we´ve decided to only work with this for the time being. After the toury(March 5th), we will set foot into the Honduran school system, and see what we can do from there.
2. 
   In other news, as we were eating dinner the other night (our usual beans, tortillas, mantequilla and rice), Simon suddenly yelled in disgust. Apparently there was a rock in his beans and he bit it and chipped his back tooth. He is in Teguciagalpa today and tomorrow having a friendly visit with the dentist to have it fixed. Also yesterday, I got really sick and couldn´t understand why it was so hard to stand up. By 4 pm, it hadnt gotten better, I was more dizzy, and there was no food left in my body, so I crawled out of bed and went to the doctor (who is only in town from 3-5pm). Turns out I was dizzy because I had a fever of 104. They did some tests and discovered that I have an infection in my intestines, probably from eating something bad. I have no idea what it could have been, but they gave me some not so pleasant shots and injections, pills and gatorade, and sent me off to rest. I go back today and am already feeling better.
   
   Oh, and our landlord has finally had his worker finish our kitchen and start working on our fence!
3. Crystal

All that I see on this bed, are California Raisins!

...Or so was the response Sunday night as Crystal and I shared a hotel room in most likely the most disgusting hotel in all of the western hemisphere. Ourselves, along with Delfo and Kathryn, who were visiting for the weekend, we in the process of searching for bedbugs in their room, after we discovered our own bed rife with fleas. Fortunately, all we found was the sheets decorated with the aforementioned California raisins, allowing us to laugh at our little dungeon and sleep uncomfortably until morning where we left as soon as possible.

We were in Santa Barbara this weekend for a super bowl party that some fellow volunteers were hosting in their city of about 40000 people, making it a rather urbanized place as far as Honduras goes. Few things in life can’t be ignored, and one is definitely the super bowl, and some volunteers convinced a bar owner down here to set up a projector so we could watch the game big screen style. Alas, it was in Spanish and was lacking the blockbuster commercials (which I hear weren’t that great anyway) but football is football and the game wasn’t too disappointing.

Otherwise, we have been settling into a pattern of what I guess you could call ¨normalcy¨ as of late. We have our national baseball tourny in less than a month, so we have been trying to have practice a couple times a week to get our kids ready for it, although they are on their summer break from school so they are a tad difficult to organize. However, school should be starting sometime this month, but nobody seems to know when exactly, and should go until some other undefined time in November. Otherwise, we have been struggling to get our library project up and running, and our construction date has been rolled back until at least May.


Simon