ESTA ES SU CASA--MARCH 2015
BACK TO SCHOOLED!
While you are counting snow days up there, we are just getting started! The school year officially began February 1. Fascinating to see hundreds of kids in their uniforms lining up outside the gate, boys to the right, girls to the left, as Profe Oracio, who I’ve known since he was in kindergarten himself, checks everyone in, suggesting a haircut here, a shoeshine there, and calling the stragglers to hurry up!
While we don’t have snow days, we do have big gaps as the year begins before everyone’s back from picking coffee in the mountains. Till at least March, things move about half-speed. But what can you do?
Don’t even ask about Chemo! The chance I dreamed of enrolling him in computer classes vanished when Wilfredo invited me to join a meeting of Caritas in his “office,” and it turned out to be the little building that WAS the computer school, now an open space with about 4 busted machines just sitting there along the wall. Caritas funds projects for the poor, but apparently computer classes ain’t one of them!
On the other hand, we have every level of education except university: kindergarten, “escuela” (primary school, grades 1-6), “colegio” (our version of high school, grades 7-9), then a 3-year “bachillerato” or “carrera”, when you specialize in some study, like Arts and Letters, Business, etc.; in Las Vegas the only “carrera” available is “Agriculture,” but that’s still a pretty good lineup for a “village”!
Nangui’s team Honduras-Progreso is learning some hard lessons of its own. They haven’t won a game in a month; maybe they’re stretched a little thin, since several teammates are playing in three “tournaments” at once. There’s the national team, hoping for a World Cup berth; but that team has already lost twice to Venezuela, in “friendlies,” to be sure, but still Coach Jorge Pinto is not pleased. We all went to the “home” game in San Pedro Sula, but Nangui did not even get in the game, although the crowd, impatient and frustrated, was calling for him. The next game was IN Venezuela, and I just couldn’t get my head around it. Nangui, never farther away from home than Tegucigalpa, suddenly is on a plane to Venezuela. I showed everyone who would listen where Venezuela is, on a map on my wall, but I was probably the most amazed of anyone. And he did get in that game—for the last ten minutes, what’s up with THAT? I decided the coach knows his value and is saving Nangui for a “real” game, like a secret weapon. But even ten minutes was enough to earn Nangui a head-shave, as a kind of initiation by his teammates.
The third cycle of games is something called the “Copa Presidente.” I never heard of it, and Fermin explained why. “It’s never been done before; it’s a toy for the idiot President we’ve got,” Juan Orlando Hernandez. Basically, it’s contests between the League teams and more local, rag-tag teams, with predictable results when the little teams embarrass the big teams. Nangui’s team is actually leading the standings with a couple victories, I don’t even know over who--or whom.
Winning or not, Nangui is a star. The daily sports paper El Diez did a two-page spread on his “private life,” featuring the “baleada” connection along with his wife Martha, and of course the two little twins. His dream, he says, is to buy his mother a new house.
But it may be a falling star. After the most recent loss, Coach Wilmer resigned. Actually, it was a noble move, to draw the criticism to himself rather than the players. “Three losses in a row, something has to change; instead of cutting 28 [players], just cut one—and that’s me.”
Chemo became a star himself, when Luis Emildo invited him to join his local cable show in Las Vegas, “Pura Vida.” Chemo’s a natural!
At least as famous as Nangui--among my readers anyway--is Beto, the blind young man in La Catorce. Two weeks beforehand, he had quietly asked me if he should invite folks to his...birthday party! “Absolutely!” I said, and I ordered one of Carlota’s enormous cakes for Sunday, September 15. After Mass, we crowded some kids in Las Vegas into a moto-taxi and headed for La Catorce, stopping at Jacagua to get the cake. Beto is 32, but still a child in his delight of his special day.
The next week, Chemo and I went to Morazan for the birthday of Fermin’s wife Maria, who turned 47, another idea I can barely get my head around. I’ve known her--and Fermin--since they were teenagers, most of their life and over half of mine. Of course, I was so dense, I didn’t realize the party was to be a surprise. Her birthday was Thursday, and everyone was telling her they’d wait till the weekend to celebrate. We arrived Wednesday, and when her daughter Arlin said to me, “I’m going to the store,” I just looked at her. “Miguel, let’s go to the store--TOGETHER!” Then I got it. And Arlin prepared a feast! Three big pans of lasagna, fat roasted chickens, broccoli with a cheese sauce, for starters. She and her husband Freddy showed up in their pickup loaded with food and drink just when Maria was thinking, “What’s going on?”
When Nangui’s family invited us to join them on an “excursion” to Tela, the beach that was the only mainland in America that Columbus actually touched (1502, his fourth voyage), I had to say yes, because Chemo had never seen the ocean. He wasn’t sure what to think at first, but each time he took another dip, he went a little farther into the waves. Soon he was begging to take a motorboat ride with his friends; some big guys were taking folks out for about a ten-minute run, surging over the waves and nearly turning the craft over! When they stopped dead at their farthest point away, I thought they were stranded. “We were looking at the sharks,” Chemo explained. Oh, yeah, the sharks! I should have thought of that!
Stay warm and stay dry!
Love, Miguel
