Cutting tanks and fire ants

Halloween trick or treaters!

Coffee farm 

The bare essentials

Our first week WWOOFing at The Leadership Center involved a lot of "cutting tanks," or weed whacking, as it's commonly known. This seemed an easy enough task until we learned how easily one can inadvertently whack a fire ant hill. First you feel a few sharp pricks on your shins or calves, which cause you to look down and notice several small ants crawling on your shoes. First you do some awkward slow-motion hopping while kicking the ground to try to shake them off and prevent them from moving north. Then the burning sensation increases and you realize with horror that the ground below you appears to be moving - you're standing in the middle of a teeming mound of fire ants. Not wanting to shut off your weed whacker (better to get those tanks over with before your hand goes numb and you incur permanent hearing loss), you begin to do a series of rapid backwards courtesies in an attempt to squash the ants inside your pants between  a knee and the other leg. As you feel the bites beginning to move up the thigh, you finally drop the whacker and start whacking your legs through your pants to squash the ants or pull your pants down entirely, all while whispering expletives, because you already took the Lord's name during the quarterly staff-student soccer match, and the classrooms are open-air and very close by, and not using profanity at in-opportune moments has never really been your strong suit. This happens every day for a week.

The food was also VERY simple. It is not an exaggeration to say we ate beans and tortillas every single meal of every single day, sometimes accompanied by steamed vegetables or less than one whole scrambled egg or, on better days, one chicken leg (see photo above for one of the sadder meals). One long-term volunteer lost 40 pounds the first month he was there. So of course we blew our last 50 lempiras on knock-off Oreos and cans of Super Cola from the snack shop, savoring every last crumb. 

But these (mildly amusing?) anecdotes don't do the experience justice. It was easily one of the best we've had on the entire trip. We spent two and a half weeks with some of the most lovely people, particularly the Honduran students, one of the teachers, a radical Black feminist (her description) from a Creole community in Louisiana, and a badass family of five from Oregon who have traveled all over the world, all of whom we hope to remain in contact with. The weather in the valley was beautiful and perfect while we planted shade trees or picked coffee beans. I (Jenn) gave three lessons on birth control and STDs/HIV during a health class and Tim made all the girls laugh during our time in the "honest chair," an English class activity in which the girls can ask the honest chair occupant any question they want so long as it's phrased grammatically correctly in English. Overall our time and conversations there gave us a lot of good ideas for how we want to live going forward, and everyone was incredibly generous with their friendship and their baked goods as we got to know them better.

Last night we arrived in Nicaragua, and we've just completed a sunset surf lesson from a guy from Wildwood (NJ, holler!). Having a wonderful time and missing you all.