Noli Me Tangere

Honduras Travelogues - Vol. 2

The night before I asked Tom what time the bus usually came.

“Usually 6:20 or 6:30.”

“Yikes.”

And so it was that by 6:30 that morning, we were on that same gravel road, making our way further up the mountain, over the ridge, then down into the valley to the Instituto El Rey, where TKO teach. In Honduras, the teachers and students all ride the same bus. It starts in La Cieba, and stops at each village along the gravel road that follows the river up into the mountains. When Tom and Kelly and Chris and I got on, it was already full of students, each bedecked in their banana yellow school uniforms. This was exams week, so it was relatively quiet and most heads were buried in notebooks. Tom explained to me that most of the kids hadn’t really developed study habits and did much of their prep on the bus. Kelly sat next to Frances with her bible opened.

It was dark when I arrived the night before, so I was seeing real Honduras for the first time. It was green, as you’d expect in the tropics, but I was struck by how sheer the mountains were. There are farmers in those hills, and it made me wonder how they could harvest land so vertical.

It’s a rough ride. The road would be harsh in a nice car, but in a recycled school bus with worn-out shocks and a full load and you tend to feel it in your bones. On two occasions, which Tom could predict like clockwork, a terrible screech came from the floor as it scraped bottom before chugging back up to speed.

Last I heard, Tom said “I sing cheese” when he meant “how much do I owe”, but now he and Kelly were speaking fluidly (from what I could tell) about a range of topics. They introduced me to the class as “hermano de Thomas” and asked if anyone had any questions for me in English.

A “no” here usually produced giggles and some murmuring en Espanol. Tom asked them who wanted to get married and the conversation veered into Spanish before I heard Tom say, “I guess we’d better have a conversation about that, then.”

Ronald, a burly kid of about seventeen, had just announced that “it’s better to just live with a girl for a little while, because if you have problems, it’s easier to leave her. Then, after many years, if you are still together, you can get married.”

Ronald is blunt enough to spell out what is commonly held. At school, PDA is not permitted, so coupling is not obvious, but it’s not uncommon for these kids to disappear from school in pairs. They call it “robbing”—a boy talks a girl into running away with him—and they’ll set up house and start having kids. Sharon told me it usually doesn’t last long, but it is always the end of education for these kids.

Kelly took one class out to a shady area outside the school to sing some songs. After a few choruses, often in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, she baited them with “do you want to hear Tom and Abe sing a song?!” And of course they did. And of course we did, though we weren’t really prepared, we were able to piece together Harrod & Funck’s “Come Clean”. The end of the song was met with applause and cries of “Otros! Otros!” During “Bitter Divorce” Tom broke out into that Run DMC breakdown we used to do:

I was born
Son of Byford, brother of Al
Bad as my mamma and Run's my pal
It's McDaniels, not McDonald's
These rhymes are Darryl's, those burgers are RONALD'S
I ran down, my family tree
My mother, my father, my brother and D
(beatbox to end)

The kids jumped up off their log seats and started dancing and striking mock hip-hop poses. After that, the “Otros” only got louder. Our genre-shattering folk-rap forays would cement Tom’s legend at the Instituto.

The beautiful thing about this scene, aside from all the silliness, is that these kids were mostly 14-18 years old, and were singing along with mucho gusto. And I tried to picture fifteen American teenagers in an enthused singalong with their classmates. Whatever. This class is, like, ultra-lame.

Before the day was over, I was gratified to teach one guitar class. They made pretty good progress for one day, and I wished that I could stick around to turn them into little Santanas.

Friday nights, TKO (and the other Americans at the campus) usually host a get-together for the youth in the area. Since the shootings a few weeks ago, most activities wrap up before dark, so this afternoon we played Sharks and Minnows in the river. What a great game. It was a lot of fun until Tom hit his headon the river.

Some of the kids cajoled me into going down a swift section on an inner tube. Not only could these kids move across the rocks like cats, but they also managed to stay on their tubes for the whole chute. Having already damaged my feet trying to walk upright on the rocks, I was able to add deep buttock bruises to my resume by sitting a little too low in the tube. I shot into the swimming hole behind the others, laughing and howling. It hurt, but it was a good kind of hurt.

Posted by aokie at September 3, 2004 08:04 PM