A typical day

About a month ago, a friend wrote me and asked me to describe my typical day. I loved the idea, because although it is something so simple that I never think to recount to my friends and family when I talk to them, it really gives them a much clearer idea of what my life is like here in Peace Corps Honduras.

5:30 am--I am usually woken up by the sound of the first bus passing my house, and the shouts that come from it. Then I go right back to sleep.
6:30 am--I am usually woken up again by the second bus. This time, I am a little more awake, but I still fall back asleep for another hour or so.
7:30--wake up, but lay in bed for a good 15 minutes, trying to either plan out my day so I´m not bored to tears, or pray for the strength to do something that I am scared of or not looking foreward to
8:00-eat breakfast and get ready to go to the cooperative
8:30--show up at the cooperative for computer classes that I´m giving to some of the kids of the members of the cooperative. The class was supposed to start at 8, but neither I nor the student ever show up on time.
8:30-10:30ish--teach classes. This mostly consists of me trying my best to describe tiny little functions on word and excel to my student, and then waiting with anguish and impatience while watching them try for what seems like hours to figure out how to, for example, copy a sentence onto the next line, something which I just taught them how to do 5 seconds ago. Sometimes it takes everything in me to keep from shouting ¨no, you don´t do that, you do this! I just showed you, how could you have already forgotten?!?!?!¨ Ah, the pains of teaching technology to people who, the closest they´ve come to a computer in their whole lives is maybe seeing a picture of it in their school text books.
10:30ish-12:00--up in the air. I usually fool around at the cooperative, chatting, looking for work, or playing solitaire on the computer (so I´m not gonna lie to you guys, okay? It´s not always %100 work here)
12:00-1:00--this is usually up in the air, too. It is always definately lunch time, but where I go for lunch, it always depends. Sometimes I go to my house and make a feast (in other words, pasta, rice and beans, or stir-fry). Other days, when I´m feeling lazy, I go visit a near-by family and they always love to feed me :) Other days, though, when I´m feeling especially motivated, I take a hike to a nearby town (usually about an hour walk) to visit the people there, and talk to women about the women´s group. They usually feed me there, too!
1:00-7:00 or 8:00--work time. Usually consists of doing a job for the cooperative, teaching environmental education or English in the elementary schools, or lately it has been working on the women´s cooperative. Either going to the nearby towns to talk to women, doing surveys on the amount of trash the town produces in a week (unusually large), or things like that. Usually by night time, I go to one of the near-by houses again for a night/dinner visit (I almost never have to cook for myself, hehe!) and if the family has TV, I usually watch the telenovela that I had to leave when I left my host family´s house, because I´m still very interested to know who´s cheating on who, and who´s threatening who with death threats! Oh, spanish telenovelas, gotta love them!
8:00-10:00--my time! I love going back to my little house and making some hot tea, and sitting out on my hammock and reading a book. Or, when the stars are especially bright, I bring my yoga mat out onto the patio in front of my house, and lay down and watch the stars!
10:00--bed time.

So that´s practically my normal day. Except on special days, obviously, like Saturdays, when I spend the whole morning teaching, and the whole afternoon trying to decided whether to spend it in my hammock, or visiting families. Or Sundays, when I usually go to mass or pretend mass (that´s what I like to call it when the priest isn´t there) in the morning, and then invite myself over to a family´s house for lunch and try to fend off the bolos (drunk men....they love to drink on Sundays) in the afternoon.