Adventures on El Tenan

I know a few of us are starting to feel cooped up in site. For the newbies, we’re here (in site) every day, most likely only working a few days out of the week. For those who have moved to their own houses/apartments, a lot of pent-up energy can be spent buying things and improving their living space. For those of us who are still living with host families and feeling a little bit more “monitored,” the idea of staying in the house all weekend is almost unbearable. There isn’t much to do in Corquin on the weekends. During the day many people still have a lot of duties, but seeing as how I don’t have a house or a family there isn’t too much I’m committed to doing.

Point is I wanted something to do Saturday and OH did I find something to do. Kristyn and I went to hike a “peak” nearby Corquin. Kristyn did Educatodos in this aldea nearby and had always wanted to hike to the top. Not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into, we headed up to the aldea around 6:30 am. Unbeknownst to me, to get to the aldea is about 1 hour by car, and (more likely) walking about 2 hours.

Aldea: rural communities outside the more “urban” towns. Corquin is an urban town. I will do most of my work in aldeas because these are the communities that don’t have water, etc.

Jalon: Basically hitchhiking, but there it’s much more common here. For people who live in aldeas 2 hours away from any sort of stores, markets, there is always one person in the town who has a pick-up truck. When that person goes “abajo” (down) then you’re going with him. Jalons are key to getting to these more rural areas.

So Kristyn and I start walking, waiting to see if anyone will drive by and give us a lift. After a little while a pick-up stops, and Kristyn goes to climb in the front seat. As she starts to climb in, the driver picks up a small pistol and puts it in his lap. This is common, but it still kind of shocks when I see guns so proudly displayed.

The driver gives us a lift part way, and we ended up walking the rest of the way. I think it probably took us 1.5 hours. So, we were relying on being able to see the peak to guide us towards it, but there was a lot of cloud cover and we couldn’t see it at all. This resulted is us taking a lot of wrong turns and having to ask a lot of people for directions. A few people asked what we were up to (there aren’t too many gringas wandering around those parts) and we said we were hiking El Tenan. More than a few times we got the, “You’re crazy” look.

So after a few wrong turns and a lot of stares we finally arrived at the house of a woman Kristyn kind of knew. One Christmas, apparently they baked cookies together, and this woman mentioned that you can reach El Tenan from her husband’s finca. Random.

Finca: Farm. Usually finca refers to the coffee “plantations.”

So we walk up to this house, and luckily the woman recognized Kristyn. We tried to politely ask if she could point us in the right direction, but you always have to visit and a visit usually includes polite chat and attempts to feed you. It’s really understandable though, because a lot of these women are locked up in the house all day. Their husbands’ go to work at 5 – 6 a.m. usually the children go to if they’re old enough. The arrival of two American girls is pretty exciting. So we’re talking to Goita (I think that’s her name) about our plans and she insists on taking us to some other houses where there are kids who will guide us up to the top.

Meanwhile, we’re sitting in her house, and having refused any food she made us some “juice.” She goes into another room and brings out a 2 liter cook bottle full of yellowish liquid. My initial reaction, honestly, was it looked like pee. Now as we’re watching her prepare these drinks we’re talking about their water situation. Apparently, she has to go get water from a water source because a tube is broken. We watch her as she pours water out of two jugs (like the ones milk comes in).

No joke … this is how this whole scenario goes down (probably has more significance for me than the readers, but oh well.)

Goita hands the drinks to us. Oh, and the yellow liquid was honey. The juice was honey and water.

Drinks in hand, Kristyn says, “There you go Hannah, the tubes are broken. Work!”

We start politely sipping on the drinks, talking about the view and stuff. While we sit there, Goita starts closing up the house. It probably took her 30 minutes. She had to straighten everything, shut the windows, and also fix herself up. I thought she looked respectable, but we have different standards apparently. She changed her clothes and took her apron off; put different shoes on. Then, she gets a little bowl and goes to the water jugs (where our water came from) and poured a little bit into the bowl. She then disappears into a room and you hear splashing sounds.

Now I’m going to explain my thinking so that you can better understand the culture, and more so the situation. People here don’t waste anything nor do they waste their effort. If a woman were to boil 4 gallons of water, said boiled water would not, then, be used to wet her hair (this is what Goita did with the water, wet her hair so she could comb it). When Kristyn and I saw her take the water from the same jugs we immediately became panicked. We didn’t even question if the water had been boiled. And, here you can’t be sure that the people know to boil their water.

Here we are drinking water from unknown origins, not knowing if it’s purified, and we’re down to half a glass.

“Oh. Shit. Where did that water come from?”
“Why didn’t we think of that?!”
“We are so screwed. We’ve got E. Coli now.”
“Don’t say that. Oh God.”

Now, you might think this is a little dramatic, but it’s really not. I’m one of the few people in my group who hasn’t yet had food poisoning, a parasite or E. Coli. This is a real threat and it’s a nasty 3 – 7 days puking/shitting into your host family’s toilet before heading to the Health Center in your town where they pump you full of weird IVs and don’t tell you what it is. I’ve heard the stories people!!

All I could think of was, “I have a semi-full week next week! I can’t be sick! I actually have work!” Not to mention, my stomach has been a little upset the past couple of days and I can’t really tell why. I feel like its already compromised and can’t protect itself from whatever bacteria that might have been introduced by that water.

We’re about ready to leave and Kristyn and I walk out of the house, where we dissolve into a somewhat frantic discussion about the likelihood of us having contracted some pretty funky bugs. I couldn’t help but notice that Goita had a skin infection all over her hands. After having given the “water quality” charla on Monday I couldn’t stop thinking about skin infections from water. I mean, this woman washes and cleans dishes in this water all day; it’s not entirely far-fetched! We walk around the back of the house and there is a corral for horses and then up on a slope there are about 10 cows. The odds are getting worse and worse.

Kristyn turns to me and says, “I’m going to ask her where that water came from!”

I’m not quite sure if Goita understood the question, and I really hope she didn’t, because she pointed to a trickle of water that ran, no joke!, practically through the cow pasture. I groaned, “Oh. My. God. POO WATER!”

But really, the main part of this story is really the generosity of Hondurans and the random situations you get yourself into when you leave your house at 6 am without the slightest clue of where you’re going.

Goita takes us to a nice house close by, where we talk to more women about our plans. We get more weird looks. They all insist that somebody guide us up there, and I can hear someone asking boys nearby to take us. We sit there, kind of awkwardly, waiting for the boys to get their things together. As we’re waiting they gave us a really nice apple, which was pretty exciting. All the apples here come from the States and they usually aren’t very good, but this one was crisp. Apples are costly here, and it was really nice of them to give us a piece.

So the boys are ready and we depart. I really don’t think they were very thrilled about having to climb a mountain because two white girls wandered through their house to climb said mountain for fun. We start walking and I tried to strike up a conversation, but they weren’t really having it. We started walking through the coffee trees and we got to a point where there was discussion about which path to take.

“Which way are we going?” says Boy 1.
Boy 2, “This way.”
Boy 1, “That’s really ugly…” And yet we continue on that path.

I wish I could convey how incredibly steep this hike was. It was so cloudy as we were walking to the aldea that I really couldn’t see exactly what we were going to hike. After we got down I was amazed at what we had done.

We only walked about an hour, which was less than the time it took to get up to the base of the mountain. These boys must have thought we were really lame. Here we are, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and we start climbing and I’m weezing and sweating profusely within minutes. Me, being the smart person I am, decided to wear shorts. Now in my defense, my legs are sickly pale compared to my arms AND I didn’t realize we’d be climbing on our knees through coffee trees and up sides of mountains.

These boys had rubber boots on (as you can see in the school pictures) and machetes. They hauled ass up that mountain as if they were walking up a small hill. Meanwhile, Kristyn and I are practically dying behind them. But, when we reached the top it was well worth it. We were definitely at the highest point and could see all over the valley. It was beautiful, and I’d like to tell you I brought my camera, but knowing that Kristyn was bringing hers, I didn’t. Kristyn whips out the camera and it barely functions. I don’t know if the pictures will come out. I suck at life.

We stayed up there for a little bit before heading back down. On our way down I couldn’t stop laughing because we were so lame. The boys, once again, gracefully walking as if it were a paved path while Kristyn practically spent the entire time on her butt. I’m really surprised they weren’t openly laughing at us at this point. They were nice kids.

We get to the bottom and decided we should pay them because we took a good chunk of their working day away. They refused the money and walked us to the main road, knowing that we had gotten lost a lot. We bid them a fond farewell, graciously thanking them for their time and started to waddle down the hill because our legs hurt so badly.

You’d think, after having gotten lost so much in the morning that we would have been more careful about where we went in the afternoon, but that was not the case. Kristyn, I thought, knew the area a little bit, and I blindly followed her. It would make sense that, after having been on the highest peak, that you would have to go DOWN to reach the town in the valley. Well, this thought occurred to us after the road consistently starting going upwards. Going up was painful and we’d been walking for an hour already when we stopped and asked a man if we were headed in the right direction. He tells us we have to turn around and walk all the way back to some intersection and then we will find the right road to Cucuyagua! ALL THE WAY BACK! I wanted to sit down in the road and cry.

We bravely walk all the way back, which took less time now that we were going downhill. Having run out of water, we stopped at a pulperia to get some.

Pulperia: Like 7-Eleven/Wawa, but in somebody’s house. Slightly smaller selection too…

We walk in to buy water and they don’t have any! This is what happens in the more rural areas. A) Why would you BUY water when you have it in your house? B) Why would you buy water when you could drink Coke or Pepsi? This is the mentality of the people in these areas. They just don’t have the education.

“When in Rome …”

So we buy Coke and chips and start walking again, laughing at how “integrated” we are. Truly Honduran when we forgo water and veggies for Coke and chips. After a little ways we get a jalon down to Cucuyagua, buy a couple of bottles of wine, shower, and go to Laura’s house to watch movies and rest. Only 7 hours wandering around/hiking`… I got the entertainment I was hoping for.

As we’re jaloning back to Corquin Kristyn looks at me and says, “So, would we be sick already if that water was bad?”