Suzanne Repatriates

The Price of Importance

2009-07-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

I admit I am still shocked by how people live here.

More than that, I am still appalled by how I used to live my life here before I learned to live in Honduras. And that life I used to live has become the life I once again live, now.

I am facing the predictable dilemma of the overpaid and overworked American upper-middle class: more than adequate funds to support a young, single, shopaphobic chick like me, with far less than adequate vacation time to enjoy it. But I am one of the lowest-paid employees in my office; I shudder to think of my superiors, who earn far more and are granted more vacation time, but who have so much responsibility at the office that they fear taking their hard-earned time off and getting too far behind at work.

It didn’t take spending two years in Central American to realize this; it only took one year of being gainfully employed before I left for Honduras. But for the first time, I am working at an office in a company where everyone is high-paid (I live in California now and not New Mexico or Honduras, for one thing). My office is fast-paced and competitive, which I chose a year and a half ago because I wanted as many new opportunities, as fast as possible, to jumpstart myself back into my career after 3 years away. I am getting those opportunities, and a lot more work besides. And absolutely everything I do has suddenly become important. Almost every job I work on has a critically important, hard deadline that comes up fast. I am constantly writing reports and doing calculations that the client needs to see in a matter of days in order to make significant decisions; I have a major deliverable due almost every week. The very consulting business model itself depends on constantly responding to Requests For Proposals from companies looking to hire. Preparing those proposals with the inevitable quick turnaround is always, 100 percent of the time, an all-night, and sometimes all-weekend, affair. And our competition is stiff; those proposals have to be good in order to win the job. I wonder if I am still not considered a full-fledged employee at my office, despite my year and a half there, because I have not come in on a weekend or pulled an all-nighter. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t worked until the early hours and on weekends at home, as my co-workers also do.

What runs this entire system? Money. As consultants, we work as hard and fast as we do because our clients pay us to do it. One of my government employee peers has told me, “We pay you to do our dirty work for us, and we pay you well.” And because we get paid well, every minute we spend working is worth a lot. I am required to fill out my timesheet accurately to the tenth of an hour, each 6-minute interval I work. My six minutes aren’t worth nearly as much as my bosses who earn over $100 and up to $200 per hour, charging $1.70 to $3.30 per minute, or $25 to $50 per 15 minutes. I know for a fact that more than one of my bosses lay awake at night worrying about their work and the money being spent on it, not unlikely because they know they personally take at least $1,000 straight from the client’s pocket daily.

I remember sitting in my apartment alone in Olanchito, hiding from the heat of day after sweltering day when I didn’t have work, wishing I could find something to do. I wanted to be necessary and important, but I would have settled for just useful. Now I find myself wishing that my work wasn’t so “important,” that I didn’t get paid so much. Then my time would be worth less to other people and no one would care how I spent it. Vacation time would be worth almost nothing and I could get a lot of it. I wouldn’t feel like I owed my best 40 hours a week to the company because of the thick stack of direct deposit checks I exchange for those hours. If only my time were worth nothing, then I would have the total freedom that I had back in Honduras.

Ausencia

2009-04-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

I have been away. From Honduras, and from this blog.

Since leaving Honduras 20 months ago, a spectrum of feelings have affected me. Before leaving Honduras, I felt:
sad
anxious
fearful about leaving the country, people, and work I had begun to love with my whole heart. But I had to leave.

And immediately upon returning to the States, I felt:
awed
thankful
relieved
comforted. I reveled in being home, cradled by the familiar, the safe and the sanitary.

But a few months after returning, I started to feel:
amused, then
confused
disappointed
doubtful, leading several months later to:

frustration
anger, and later to

disgust
guilt
grief
and
exhaustion.

For what has felt like a long time, the list has ended here. I only recently have begun to understand that a major part of my exhaustion has been not only the emotional effect of reverse culture shock, but also deeply physical. I was recently diagnosed with having a long-standing, possibly 4-year-old infection that I most likely caught and brought home from Honduras. Apparently my digestive tract has been colonized by invisible parasites that hide when the stool testing cup comes out. I have given six parasite samples, and the several dozen tests performed on those samples have consistently returned negative results. Over the past year, various doctors have diagnosed me with a stomach ulcer, lactose intolerance, anorexia, and a “stressful lifestyle.” Doctors have prescribed me antacids that made my stomach blow up like a balloon, told me to take up yoga (I have done yoga for years), told me to avoid dairy (despite having no problems with dairy my entire life before now), take vitamins, go on the BRAT diet (I had already put myself on the BRAT diet for nearly 6 months in an attempt to reduce my digestive agony), gain weight (is it possible to gain weight on the BRAT diet?), and get regular exercise (I don’t have a car and so I walk and bike everywhere, including to work every day, and did I mention I do yoga?), before being prescribed a common antiparasital drug that I took regularly in Honduras.

My body is responding to it. Not perfectly, but I am feeling so much better. I have energy again. I have thoughts again. I want to write.

The world keeps turning without me,

2008-07-09T18:21:00.001-07:00

thank goodness. Another water system project that I left in Honduras is about to start construction. After an initial visit to the community of San Carlos last June (that I helped coordinate), a year of States-side meetings about fundraising and design (including conference calls that I occasionally attended), and last week's threat of indefinite postponement thanks to the Honduran national water works agency SANAA (whose express interest seems to be to stop all progress that doesn't funnel money through them or give them credit for work they won't do), San Carlos will get part of its aging, dehabilitated system upgraded within the next month. But I never worried about this one, knowing it has been in the capable hands of the Greater Lansing Professional Partners chapter of Engineers Without Borders all along.

I am so grateful to the Lansing Partners for taking their commitment seriously to help the community, no matter how long it takes. It makes me feel less guilty that I left the citizens of San Carlos behind.

Preparing for the Lansing Partners visit with the San Carlos Water Board, April 2007 (photo by Israel Rosales of the Honduran NGO that I worked with, Alfalit)

School children of San Carlos welcoming the Lansing Partners, June 2007 (photo by Susan MacNeil of the Partners)

Trade-offs

2008-06-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

Things I lived without in Honduras that are part of my daily life now:

*Electricity, water, cell phone and Internet service, at any time and place I need it and even when and where I don’t
*Clothes washer and dryer
*Window panes
*Hiking, backpacking and camping
*Book stores and libraries
*Visual arts (as original works in museums and galleries, but also as reprints posted on the walls of even the most common homes and buildings)
*Entertainment (aside from talking with the same people I talked with the day before about the same things we talked about the day before)
*The company of people my age
*The company of people of my race
*The company of people of my social class
*A peaceful tree to lie beneath and not be molested by drunks, thieves or scabies
*Safe drinking water
*Relief from the sun
*Driving
*9 to 5 (more like 8 to 6)
*Smog
*Global guilt (i.e. worrying that my carbon footprint in the U.S. is 4 times higher than the world average; in Honduras it was 4 times less)
*Daily existential crises including:
1) The feeling that I don’t do, or have, enough
2) The alarming realization that possibly the majority of people I am close to suffer from some level of addiction and/or depression, neither of which are acknowledged by society as problems

Things I live without now:

*Being constantly surrounded by a lush natural landscape
*Being constantly surrounded by good-looking young people
*Cheap, convenient public transportation
*Public transportation that involves risking your life every time you ride
*The subtext of life-or-death struggle in the comfort of my own home (including competing with food-consuming ants in the kitchen and dodging possibly-malaria-bearing mosquitoes in the bedroom)
*Being gawked at everywhere I go, and the accompanying unwanted but default responsibility of being the daily live entertainment for an entire town
*Being called by other white people’s names (people whom I may or may not have ever known)
*Generous, sociable neighbors
*Men constantly telling me how great I look
*Fear of being slapped on the butt by bicyclists as I walk down the street (this actually happened once in Honduras, and it was so startling that I still flinch when people on bicycles pass too close)
*Patience from strangers, or anyone else (including myself)
*Friends to go dancing with every weekend
*Family life
*Desperation to get married
*Leisure reading
*Time to do, or think about, absolutely nothing

The Terminator officially justifies my employment

2008-06-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

For a hydrologist, there’s nothing like a drought, or a flood for that matter, to cement one’s status as a necessary advisor to every state and local government agency. And there’s nothing like global warming to ensure more of both. So please, let’s keep driving our SUV’s, snubbing public transit and protesting greenhouse gas controls, if only for the sake of my job security.

Schwarzenegger declares statewide drought in California
By Don Thompson, Associated Press Writer

SACRAMENTO (AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proclaiming a statewide drought after two years of below-average rainfall, low snowmelt runoff and the largest court-ordered restrictions on water transfers in state history.

His office said he would issue an executive order Wednesday directing the state's response to unusually dry conditions that are damaging crops, harming water quality and causing extreme fire danger across California. Many communities already are requiring water conservation or rationing to deal with the shortfall.

Schwarzenegger's statewide drought declaration is the first since 1991, when Gov. Pete Wilson acted in the fifth year of a drought that lasted into 1992.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said this week it would cut water supplied to Central Valley farms to 40 percent of the amount growers contract for with the federal government. That could mean hundreds of acres of crops won't be planted this year, according to the giant Westlands Water District, which supplies growers who produce about $1 billion worth of crops each year.

The governor is warning that conditions could be even worse in 2009 if there is another dry winter.

Something's lost, something's gained

2008-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Life goes along well with its adventures and routines, and suddenly I find myself on the brink of profound loss. How quickly the Honduran version of my identity has slipped out of my reach. I deeply grieve the distance from my Honduran friends, family and lovers; my Central American personality; my Spanish; simple delicious food; humility; time. I feel completely at a loss for how to act here sometimes.

Then again, it was so liberating to get gas after yoga today: I, a woman alone at a gas station after dark, sweaty, unkempt and in public, with no one looking at me as if I shouldn’t be there because I was unguarded, unsightly or foreign.

Cyborgs at the grocery store

2008-05-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

In the past 10 days, I have visited half a dozen different apartments for rent, found two great new housemates (to share an apartment between all three of us) in midtown Sacramento and had brunch with them, gone out to dinner twice with new local friends and once with a visiting out-of-town friend, given an evening presentation about Third World water infrastructure development to a 40-person crowd drawn by the local Water For People chapter, attended a co-worker’s 30th birthday dinner-and-dancing celebration and helped organize another co-worker’s bachelorette party. I have also been working.

I was looking forward to this weekend being different. After the crazy past two weeks, I wanted to keep the weekend simple. So this morning, I purposely woke up late to catch up on sleep. I did a long, leisurely yoga session at home and ate a slow breakfast. But then I went to the grocery store. And what was supposed to be a routine errand turned out to be a trying test of my depleted energy and a reversion to a level of reverse culture shock I thought I had gotten over several months ago.

Actually, I went to the co-op, that bastion of community feel-goodness. I was badly in need of some nourishing food for lack of time to go shopping over the past two weeks. Though I usually bike, I decided to drive because I had coupons to use and wanted to buy more than my bike can handle (or rather, that I can handle carrying on my bike).

When I got to the co-op, I looked around the entrance for a shopping cart. I have never paid attention to where the carts are kept because I always make sure to shop with a smaller basket, something I’ve done since Honduras when I started doing all my grocery shopping on foot and by bike. In any case, I didn’t see any carts, so I went inside to ask one of the clerks where they were. Immediately upon entering the store I was accosted by the usual maze of tables laden with sugary over-processed dessert products and too-bright fluorescent lighting. I was so over-stimulated that I literally stopped dead in my tracks, temporarily disoriented, before I could think to look for a store employee. I finally located one and she pointed to another door across the store and said I could find carts outside the side entrance. I thanked her and threaded my way through the crowd to the side entrance door.

However, when I got to the door I realized that it was automatic and only opened from the outside. I was inside. I wound my way back through the store, out the front entrance and around to the side, where I finally found a cart. Hands on cart, re-useable bags and containers and coupons at the ready, I took a deep breath and re-entered the store.

I entered the automatic doors correctly this time, from outside to inside. I carefully navigated the bulky mass of the shopping cart in front of me, even so nearly missing several hurrying customers who didn’t bother to make eye contact with me as they passed, not allowing me to anticipate their trajectories. I entered the bulk section, parked my cart, extracted a plastic container from my mass of bags and began filling it with dried apricots. Apparently my cart was so offensive that passers-by felt they had to squeeze by without touching it in the narrow aisle, and also give it dirty looks. I had to interrupt my bulk-filling several times to move it over a few inches.

Bulk shopping completed, I pulled out my coupons. The first was for juice, so I headed for the juice aisle. Of course I didn’t know which aisle was the juice aisle; I never buy juice anymore because I have come to prefer fresh fruits since living in the tropics. I slowly wheeled my cart perpendicular to the long shelves, gazing up at the signs labeling them. I found the juice aisle, turned into it and matched my coupon with the correct brand. Even with the dollar-off coupon, the small bottle of organic sugar-free nectar was still going to cost me four times that much. Wondering what kind of juice was worth four dollars when I could buy enough lemons for an equivalent amount of fresh lemonade for one dollar, I decided my consultant salary allows me to afford these luxuries and put the bottle in my cart.

I proceeded on with my coupon shopping, not sure I was really getting bargains but at least limiting myself to using coupons for products, if not brands, that I usually buy. Soy milk, yogurt, Australian licorice all went in the cart. Then I headed for the produce section.

Usually I enjoy shopping for produce as the most interesting part of urban food procurement. You can get anything that tastes so-so in a box, but picking the right seasonal fruits and vegetables can really make a meal. The trouble was that, being so busy, I hadn’t been to a farmer’s market in several weeks. I had no idea what is in season now that spring is rapidly turning to summer. I thought hard about what should be in season in late May: Avocados. Paterna. Mamones. I settled for depending on the prices to tell me what is abundant in North America this time of year. I scanned the shelves of frothing, foreign greenery comprising dozens of different vegetable edibles. Organic? Conventional? Locally grown? Imported? The answers to these questions seemed to determine price more than anything else. I changed my mind about relying on prices and asked a clerk stocking daikon radishes what I should buy. Luckily he was friendly about it.

At last I headed for the checkout line. By this time the earlier crowd had died down, I imagine because it takes a normal American less than a full hour to shop for one person. I immediately unloaded my goods onto the moving electronic band and surrendered my re-useable bags to the bagger. Feeling spent, I was surprised when the checkout girl asked me about the La Ceiba shirt I was wearing. Have you really been there? she asked with a friendly smile. I used to live there, I replied, realizing she must also know Honduras. She confirmed that thought by rejoining, I used to live in Tela. Excitedly I asked, Were you a Peace Corps volunteer?!, pointing to the re-useable PC-logo grocery bag I had with me. No, she shook her head. I taught English at a bilingual school for a year and then taught SCUBA diving for a few months afterwards, she explained. As she scanned the barcodes of my milk and yogurt, I continued to barrage her with questions about her life in Honduras. How long ago were you there? (answer: Three years ago, maybe four now? It seems like so long ago.) Did you ever visit Olanchito? (Where?) Have you been back to visit? (No…) Do you still have friends there? (No, they all left within two years of me [i.e. were all Americans]).

Finally I realized that despite her friendly overture, she wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation and my questions were just distracting her from ringing up my vegetables. So I stopped in the middle of my interrogation and let her do her job. I swiped my credit card as I was told. The bagger finished and I swung my bags onto my arms. I gave the checker an enthusiastic goodbye, but she had already moved on to the next customer and didn’t notice.

I went home, put my groceries away, and made a small lunch. Then I turned off my cell phone and took a long siesta, something that I haven’t had time to do for weeks but that I used to do every day in Olanchito.

During my first months back in the States, I was able to gradually re-add aspects of my life that I had lost while abroad: first my family, then friends, then my career. Since I have moved to California and started working, though, my life has rapidly outpaced me and the concurrent explosions in my social life and my work productivity leave me more than 100% drained. I am trying to live up to the expectations that others have of me, if only to ensure that I continue to be considered a good friend and co-worker. The times that I choose not to participate in energy-draining activities that most would consider recreational, though, I get the feeling that people think I am lazy or weak or unreliable. Perhaps that is because I am still in the Latin habit of always saying yes and then cancelling at the last minute if I just don’t feel like it. Interestingly, it is my friends with young children who are most empathetic, who understand that life is meant to be lived at the changeable pace of the heartbeat, the smile, the child’s cry, and not the 9 am-to-6 or the Speed Limit 65.

As I sit here sweating on my bed in the pre-summer Honduras-reminiscent heat, I think about my co-op visit and wonder what kind of automaton world I now live in where people are so self-absorbed that they forget to acknowledge the humanity of the people around them, where the very doors are powered by electricity and seemingly a simple power outage, like the kind I used to experience every day in Honduras, would leave us locked inside our concrete boxes, inhaling the traces of our own impatient fumes.

Speaking of Me

2008-05-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, recently this blog has been taken over by pathetically pithy posts, mostly about other people’s lives. I know I have led you to believe that this blog is about repatriating, meeting new Latino friends in the States and lots of thoughtful comparisons of Honduran and American culture.

One word: I am
Overwhelmed.

A few memorable things I did this week:

*I tried “new” foods:
In my kitchen mid-week, I noticed a red bell pepper I had bought at the co-op was just about ready to go bad. I realized that I couldn’t remember what roasted red pepper tastes like. So I roasted it. Roasted red bell pepper is gooood.

*I worshipped the god of literacy:
My boss told me to order the most recent (just last year’s) printing of a 500-page reference volume and read it. Its price: over half my monthly rent in Honduras. When that book arrived, new and smelling of glue, I opened it to the middle, stuck my nose in deep, inhaled. And nearly cried. Information verily pours forth from every crack in this country, available at just the click of a button and the swipe of a plastic card. It is so easy to learn here. Apparently, it is even possible to get paid to learn here.

I have been back for 8 months, and I still have moments of rediscovery like these on a weekly basis. I miss experiencing them daily, like I did when I was recently returned. Yet they are so intense that I am also grateful that they occur less and less often the longer I am here.

I am glad to be in my home country and culture. I am happy that my cell phone rings daily, as friends from the ever-more-vast expanse of my adult American life call in to say hi or to plan the weekly work carpool. In Honduras, I could go for almost a week without receiving any calls.

I am happy to have a lot of roommates and to live within just a few blocks of a good friend who stops by all the time; I am rarely alone and that gives me little time to be lonely. In Honduras, I lived alone for almost two years and can count on one hand the number of times that I enjoyed unexpected visits from Honduran friends. And that was in a culture where stopping by uninvited is the norm.

I am glad that my new American social life is already effortlessly active, even though that has more to do with the intemperate pace of life here than with my own success at socializing. I am grateful, even though said social life quickly overwhelms me and I end up turning down at least as many engagements as I keep.

In fact, though I am glad to be back, I understand very little here.

I can’t figure out why Americans complain about not having enough time to do anything during the week, and yet they book their weekends so full that their only supposed “free” time mimics their work-week schedule.

I am confused by why so many Americans prefer to live with animals rather than with other people.

I don’t understand why Americans wear such unflattering clothing.

I am appalled by how much Americans talk, and think, about themselves.

I am scared by how quickly I am re-becoming American.

A little humor for you engineers

2008-05-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

Overhead across the cubicle maze of my office today:

Voice 1 [encouraging]: Well, it’s our job. Remember, we’re “Building a Better World.” [slogan of the engineering firm where I work]

Voice 2 [frustrated]: No, we're not. We’re just determining the feasibility of building a better world.

Baby Crazy!

2008-05-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

Within a week of each other last month, two of my girl friends had babies: Diego Cash Wilson Acosta (born to bilingual entrepreneurs) and Evelyn Rose Lerner (born to biologists). Too bad the kids live in different states, otherwise I’d already be setting them up!

Here are some funny videos of Evie and Baby D doing their newborn thing, which is nothing as far as I can tell. But that’s why it’s so entertaining! And really, how much more advanced do our lives get with the years?

Errant garlic

2008-04-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

As a water resources consultant, part of my job is to keep abreast of the latest water news. That's easy to do since I am signed up on a listserve, run by the California Department of Water Resources, that automatically compiles the day's crises from newspapers around the state and emails them direclty to me.

Last week's news was topped by the immensely controversial Wanger decision, in which federal Judge Wanger cancelled the entire salmon fishing season off the Pacific coast of California until the end of 2008. The idea is to keep the dwindling salmon population from extinction, but the fishing industry is devasted and will probably respond by overfishing everything but salmon for the rest of the year.

Today's hot news: it might rain this week. And this. Watch out for errant garlic, I entreat you.

Garlic spill suit settled for $60,000
by Meredith May, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Gilroy, CA - One of Gilroy's largest garlic-processing companies took responsibility Monday for letting chunks of garlic slip into a nearby creek, creating a "swamp gas" that killed hundreds of fish, authorities said.

The company, Christopher Ranch, agreed to pay $60,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office.

"When raw garlic comes into contact with large bodies of water it forms hydrogen sulfide, which takes oxygen out of water, suffocating the fish," said Ken Rosenblatt, who prosecuted the case.

Several hundred suckerfish and at least nine federally protected steelhead salmon died when the garlic spilled into Carnadero Creek in February 2007. The garlic apparently fell off delivery trucks and was swept into a parking lot storm drain that is supposed to be opened only in the event of catastrophic flooding, Rosenblatt said.

Typically, errant garlic is sent into a pit and pumped into an evaporation pond so the garlic can dry and compost back into the soil.

But someone left the guillotine-style gate open on the flood pipe, which empties into the creek. A local naturalist who monitors the creek daily noticed a milky white sheen and lots of belly-up fish Feb. 3, 2007.

In response to the spill, Christopher Ranch spent $250,000 upgrading its storm water drainage system, which was nearly 50 years old.

The $60,000 fine will be put into fish and game preservation funds maintained by Santa Clara County and the state.

The garlic spill cleared up on its own, Rosenblatt said, but sent a clear warning that water and garlic don't mix.

What did you do over Spring Break?

2008-04-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

I haven't been any kind of student for years, so unfortunately I no longer have that mid-winter reprieve that can awaken death itself, Spring Break.

But luckily some students from SUNY-ESF (State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry) in Syracuse do. Last month they spent one week in the community of Buena Vista, near Olanchito, working on the design for the community's first piped drinking water system.

I was put in touch with their student Engineers Without Borders chapter last spring while I was still in Honduras, and I coordinated their first visit to Buena Vista last summer. Now they are well on their way to completing the project, minus a little money.

I am so impressed with Sarah, Mitch, Mark and the rest of the group not only for organizing an international community service spring break trip, but also for committing their time and energy, in the midst of their busy final undergraduate years, to designing an entire drinking water system and doing the fundraising for it.

In preparation for the first visit from SUNY-ESF last year, the people of Buena Vista worked long and hard with me. I slept on the dirt floors of their homes; I hiked with them through the humid forests and plots of green coffee trees on the steep slopes of their muddy mountains. I ate their tortillas that the women got up at 5 am to start hand-milling corn for, and drank their homemade lemonade without asking where the water came from.

I remember once, in the middle of doing a topographic survey through the community, I was dehydrated and thirsty and I asked a woman with several children on the dusty porch of a nearby adobe house for something to drink. I was immediately attended to with a glass of slightly tinted water. I drank it down gratefully, enjoying but not recognizing the sweet flavor. Then I realized that it was sugar water. It was all the woman had in her house to serve me; she hadn't even had any fruit to make me juice. I didn't even think to worry if that had been the last of her sugar.

Looking through the students' photo gallery from their recent trip, I looked closely at every Honduran face and I recognized most of them. I just wish they could look back at me.

Oops, he did it again

2008-04-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

update from the Daily Texan:

UT student company wins $327,500

By Amy Bingham

A company developed by UT graduate students won Rice University's Business Plan Competition, earning the participants $327,500 to invest in their venture. Andrew Mills, Barry Kahn and Jiten Dalvi's company qcue took the top prize ahead of 36 teams for their software, which works with box office companies to prevent ticket scalping and affords companies more control over the price of and reselling of tickets.

"It was one of those days that I'll remember for the rest of my life," Kahn said. "It gets us part of the way. It was money we were trying to go after anyway."

The multifaceted competition was designed to simulate real-world scenarios where teams present business plans to venture capital investors, said Mary Lynn Fernau, director of marketing for the Rice Alliance, which hosted the event.

Participants competed in different scenarios, such as the "elevator pitch," where teams had the length of an elevator ride - about 60 seconds - to convince a possible investor to fund their company. Teams also delivered three 15-minute presentations describing their business plans.

"During our last pitch, the 650-seat auditorium was standing room only," Kahn said. "People were really excited about what we were doing."

Of the 190 teams that have competed in the Rice competition since its inception eight years ago, 35 percent, or 65 companies, are still in business today.

While the win is a huge step forward for the young company, qcue members still have a long way to go before their product will hit the market. Kahn said the team's immediate goals are to secure investment funds and move forward with prospective customers.

"We would love to have an event run using our technology as soon as possible," Kahn said.

Qcue will compete in the Global Moot Corp Competition at the McCombs School of Business April 30 to May 3.

That's my brother!

2008-03-20T18:41:00.000-07:00

In today's Daily Texan:

Moot Corp winners advance to global competition
By Katie Quinn

Barry Kahn and Andrew Mills, doctoral students at UT [the University of Texas], of the business team "qcue, llc," won the Texas Moot Corp Competition on Wednesday for their plan to integrate NASDAQ-like capabilities into e-commerce platforms.

The graduate student competition simulates the process of raising venture capital, said Ann Whitt, Moot Corp marketing communications manager. Four teams competed in the final round of the competition at the McCombs School of Business for a chance to advance to the Moot Corp global competition in May."Students create real-world companies, fine tune a business plan and practice making pitches to investors," she said. About 50 percent of students who go through the program launch their company, she said. The business school hosted 11 teams, and four advanced to the final round, she said.

MBA students Steven Mailman and Barbara Oppenheimer started the business plan competition at the University in 1984 as a program that would compare to the law school "moot court" trials.Moot Corp is now recognized as the world's most prestigious competition of its kind. In 1993, BusinessWeek called it "the Super Bowl of world business-plan competitions." Last year, 36 teams from every continent except Antarctica competed in the global competition hosted at the business school, Whitt said.

At Wednesday's competition, teams presented their business plans to a panel of judges composed of two venture capitalists, a banker and a public offering investor."The main benefit for students is the unbiased feedback from the judging panel," Whitt said. "They make their decisions as if they're going to invest money in the companies. Students also hope that people who hear their pitch will invest in their business and help them start it."

Many Moot Corp participants join the program after taking a course on new venture creation, taught by Robert Adams Jr., Whitt said. "Rob knows exactly what you need to be doing if you want to start a company," said Kevin Reichle, MBA student and competitor.Reichle and his teammates plan to seek funding for their product and build a prototype. "Moot Corp has given us access to a lot of local business leaders and really good feedback that has helped us refine our business plan," Reichle said. "I would absolutely recommend Moot Corp and Rob Adams' course to other graduate students."

The program has grown more successful each year as more business students return to graduate school to start a business, Whitt said.The 24 sponsors that support Moot Corp include the UT IC Squared Institute, the NASDAQ Educational Foundation and Bank of America.

All in a Day's Work

2008-03-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

Today: almost stampeded during a well survey in Yuba County.

The Farmers' Market

2008-03-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

California glories in food. Sure, California cities are famous for their inventive chefs and cuisine, but ultimately it is the produce, year-round fresh direct from farms on some of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world, that gives California its sabor. Part of the privilege of living in the golden state is that no matter what your social status, you have access to California’s bounty by way of a local farmer’s market. Almost every city and small town has at least one farmer’s market weekly throughout the year, and market time blossoms into twice a week as summer approaches and the state’s vegetable glut grows. Not only are the goods fresher than you can find in even the local supermarkets, but they are also often sold at bargain prices in a state where it seems that the majority of grocery stores cater to the eight-dollar-a-bite taste.

Of course, these deals are found at the lower-class farmers’ markets. When I used to live in San Francisco, a few weeks every winter I could find one dollar a pound spinach, somewhere among the Saturday crowd and the vendors’ concrete stalls in an empty lot off the south side of town. I remember six-dollars-a-pound raw almonds at the downtown Civic Center market, where vendors allow beggars to forage an extra apple or orange, and live chickens are sometimes sold from the back of a closed truck and in violation of city health code to residents who descend the hill from Chinatown.

Farmers’ markets aren’t only for bargains, though. The Saturday Embarcadero waterfront market in San Francisco sells those $10 jars of pickled cherries and $15 bouquets of hot-pink daisies that apparently a lot of people want to be able to afford, because it is just as crowded as the cheaper attraction that is the farmers’ market at 8th and W under the freeway in Sacramento. Meanwhile, the Davis farmers’ market is mainly community entertainment. It is this market that I have been frequenting since I moved here two weekends ago.

Held in the classy center of town on the grounds of a grassy park, the Davis market is not about anything cheap. A live band plays, old women sell handmade jewelry and quilts, young men sell hand-worked wrought iron wine stands and school board candidates campaign from pamphleted booths. More than that, the market is filled with people who just hang out. In contrast to most other markets that are visited by one member of the family doing the weekly shopping, in Davis parents bring their children, children bring their friends, and friends bring their lovers to the farmers’ market. Most people do actually shop for awhile. But then they stand around and listen to the band, or buy lunch from one of the stands selling hot food and congregate on the benches around the park’s edge, or lounge in the grass with their legs curled beneath their long hippie skirts.

Given its laid-back atmosphere and the fact that Davis is a friendly place in general, I am learning that the farmers’ market is a great place to meet people. Here are some of the characters I have met in the past two weeks, and how I have met them:

Last week:

*After gawking at the live band, buying a small handmade quilt for Naomi’s son’s first birthday and picking up some produce, near the end of the line of vendors I came upon a stand selling Afghani food. Behind the stand was a young, handsome Afghani-American man who plied me with bite after bite of boulani bread and Afghani sauces. Despite his simultaneous wooing of half a dozen other customers, he gave me so many samples that eventually he stopped handing them to me on the health code-required napkin but rather directly from his fingertips. The food was so good, the sun so warm and his smile so inviting that I couldn’t help telling him that I was falling in love with him. He had been keeping me on my toes with his banter, but when I said that part about love I think his eyes almost crossed, and I realized that he must be nearly ten years younger than me. But I will never give up a chance to eat straight from the hand of a dark-haired man.

*I was sitting on a bench underneath a tree, ravenously ripping open a package of boulani I had just bought (I fell for the sex-appeal propaganda, I know) when a retarded boy came up to me and stuck his hand right into my open container of garlic-mint yogurt spread. His father came quick after him to pull it out, but I wasn’t bothered and offered to share. I started chatting with the father, a professor at UC Davis named Sandy who grew up near Georgetown in DC. His wife wasn’t with him, but I met all three of his adorable and therefore comically serious-named children Geneva, Jackson (the retarded one) and Truman, who look to be about 10, 8 and 2 years old.

Today:

*As I approached the farmers’ market on my bike, I noticed a large and intriguing white tent set up on the grass in the middle of things. I locked my bike to a signpost and headed toward the tent, observing a long line snaking from the entrance. A long line can only have something free at the other end, so I walked up and joined the queue. What is this line for? I asked the young-looking blonde woman in front of me. Tomatoes, she told me. It turned out I was about to enter the tomato tent, where various local restaurants were cooking up all variety of tomato-themed dishes. We exchanged names (which are almost the same; hers is Susan), and for the next half an hour it took to go through the line together we enjoyed pizza, lasagna, two kinds of tomato soup, paella, shrimp with cocktail sauce cradled in an empty half-lemon rind, and even the town high school’s cafeteria pasta, served by the cafeteria ladies themselves. It wasn’t until her grey-haired husband showed up that I noticed the wrinkles around Susan’s eyes and realized that her youthful demeanor belied her true age. Both she and her husband are doctors and have lived in Davis since medical school, which for them was just a few years after I was born. As we parted ways at the end of the tomato feast, Susan asked for my number and invited me to join her professional women’s social group. I gave her my card (I am so glad I have a real “card” now); I hope she calls.

* * *

I also ran into Sandy and his kids and Saleem (the Afghani) again today, all of whom remembered me (and my name!). Sandy invited me to the pub trivia game he hosts every Monday night at one of the popular bars in town. I’ll have to go sometime. Saleem was wearing a tighter shirt and looking even better than last week, so I got intimidated and ran away from his stand without saying much. In any case, it’s nice that Davis is a place of easy friendships. It helps me not to feel so far away from Honduras.

The Persistence of Memory

2008-03-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Today I found myself cited in a hydrology trade magazine for work I did 4 years ago (take a look at the references at the end of the article).

There are few things more flattering than being remembered.

What I love about living with 6 housemates

2008-03-12T12:26:00.001-07:00

always having someone to say goodbye to when I leave for work in the morning
always finding someone cooking dinner in the kitchen when I come home from work in the evening
dinner becoming a combined-effort, hours-long affair that last night evolved from horchata with sour garlic-mint cheese with kalamata olives and heated corn tortillas (try it, I swear it's good!) to te de jamaica (hibiscus tea) with homemade baked enchiladas, sage pinto beans, brown rice and green salad followed by vanilla ice cream with roasted almonds and homemade hot fudge sauce
always laughing at or with someone
leaving the windows open and the doors unlocked at night, and the thought of being unsafe not even crossing my mind
falling asleep to the sound of Marisol's and Keren's laughter in the next room over

Homage to Naomi

2008-03-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Inspired by fellow blogger Minty, who recently has been sharing the approaching-infinite-levels-of-coolness of her friends, this post is dedicated to an old friend of mine who is quickly helping California become home again.

Said friend and I met when I moved to California in 1999. We both started our jobs as interns at the U.S. Geological Survey simultaneously, both as relatively directionless recent college graduates. We were placed in cubicles right next to each other, and spent a good part of the following year together making jokes and throwing paper airplanes over our shared fabric half-wall. When I started thinking hard about graduate school, she gave me a reading list about California water issues because she thought they might motivate me. She was right. She also sold me my first car, her mother’s late 1980’s grey Toyota Camry that she had named Silver Sparkle as a child, but that I ended up naming Esperanza because driving the thing required a lot of faith (and some help from her father in replacing the transmission that blew out a week after I bought it).

Then she quit and moved to Davis to be with her future husband, Russ (ok, I can’t blame her, Russ is a good guy), and the paper airplane days ended. I attended her wedding in 2001, but then our lives drifted apart and we just barely stayed in touch. I moved to New Mexico to study; she stayed in Davis. I joined the Peace Corps, she stayed in Davis. We dropped out of each others’ sights completely.

In spite of being out of touch the entire three years I was Central America, I finally called her up one day last fall after I returned. Thank goodness she and her husband have owned their own home since before they were married; unlike the majority of my more itinerant friends, her phone number hasn’t changed in years and I got through to her immediately. After a few minutes of exclamations about how much time had passed, she told me that she now had a baby boy, which led to another round of exclamations. I told her I was thinking about moving back to California, and without hesitation she enthusiastically started listing all of the great places we would go and all of her wonderful friends that she would introduce me to. When I interviewed for my current job in Sacramento last December, I made a special trip to Davis to see her. Without my even asking, she offered to give me a driving tour of the area, a tour that even her tired 9-month old couldn’t deter her from. Later she dragged Russ and the baby out to have dinner with me at a restaurant on my birthday, and she made sure to ply me with pieces of three kinds of birthday cake and a bottle of wine that she (and Russ) had bought especially for me.

You know how the story goes: I accepted the job and moved to California. And when I happened to find a room for rent in a house just 5 blocks from where she lives in Davis, I jumped at the chance. I moved in last weekend, and already she has invited me to two walks and two dinners at her house, all of which I have happily accepted. She has given me a desk and a coat rack to put in my otherwise furniture-spare new bedroom. Not to mention that she helped me through my first bad bout of homesickness (for Honduras and Maryland simultaneously) yesterday. Next up? Her son’s first birthday party with all of her family and friends this coming weekend.

Naomi and I have led very different lives since our paths briefly crossed back in 1999. That doesn’t bother her at all; I think she knows that that doesn’t bother me either. Maybe she doesn’t know that she was the person who ultimately pointed me toward my career in hydrology, which has determined my life’s course ever since we met, or that I consider her one of the most grounded, fun-to-be-around and loving people I have ever had the pleasure of befriending. I am posting this entry so that now, she will know.

Back in the Golden Land

2008-02-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

Since I left northern California at the end of the summer of 2001 to go to grad school, I have thought almost constantly about returning. Now I’ve finally moved back, and it’s just like old times. So far during my first week living in California again, I have:

*reveled in sunny, nearly (or above) 60 degree weather 6 out of 8 days since I arrived last Friday. Yes, it is still February here, too.

*flipped gratuitously through at least four different Hispanic radio stations in the car during my 15-minute commute each morning. This has included singing along to the current reggaeton smash “Es Que Te Quiero-ro” at least twice a day, once on the way to work and once on the way back.

*bought all the ingredients for an entire week’s meals at the farmer’s market, which last Sunday offered several dozen different types of fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables; homemade bread; preserves; honey and cheese. I also could have bought meat, locally harvested oysters and recently-caught fish if I had wanted to. Did I mention that it’s still the middle of winter here?

*played freeway loop-the-loop, the game of being inadvertently funneled onto the labrynthine and ubiquitous California freeway system over and over again while trying to navigate your way off it.

*seen the snow-covered Sierras from across fields of wintering orchards while driving through the Central Valley…and from the windows at the office where I now work.

*eaten an avocado, alfalfa sprout, apple and goat cheese sandwich on fresh multigrain-walnut bread.

Adding to those familiar experiences that I already associate with normal Northern California existence, my new life direction has also lead me to:

*begin a new job at an international engineering consulting firm with clients that deal in the very issues that first motivated me, over half a decade ago, to begin my career path toward addressing worldwide water problems.

*attend a service at the Iglesia de la Virgen de Guadalupe in the Hispanic part of downtown Sacramento last Sunday. The church was packed. The mass was entirely in Spanish. The congregation was entirely Latino. Young children stood on their fathers’ laps to see better. Half a dozen babies babbled and wailed through the whole thing. No one was offended. Tacos were served on the sidewalk outside the church afterwards. I was not in Honduras again, but I could have been in Mexico. Andale!

I love all of these parts that I already know of California. But what I really love are the possibilities of California. California is the unreachable peaks of miles-high mountains and the unimaginable insides of wildflowers. California is where you can’t drive/bike anywhere without passing an organic supermarket, a perchlorate-free dry cleaner’s or a wind farm. California is forgetting that the rest of the world (and for that matter, the rest of the state) isn’t also dominated by homo-pot-toking socialists. California is where average people think they can be movie stars and movie stars think they can be President. California is Vermont hippies with the egos of Texans.

If Washington, DC is the place that Barack Obama recently called “the place where good ideas go to die,” California is the place where good ideas go to thrive. If the DC mentality is that working for good can at best only maintain the broken status quo, the California outlook is that if it is our humble destiny to rule the world, we may as well make it better. California is where people believe that their own uniqueness, individuality and sheer will have the power to do things like tame some of the world’s most unruly rivers to create the world’s most productive agricultural areas out of former deserts and swamps. California manifests the very best aspects of American megalomania in a way that I have not found anywhere else in my enormous, diverse and overwhelming United States of America.

Thomas Wolfe said that you can’t go home again. But I already have, many times and to many places. California is the home I have returned to this time. It is sweet.

The Long Drive Out

2008-02-15T17:09:00.000-08:00

Day 1: Marion, VA
Mexican food (and people, neither pictured) can even be found in Appalachia. Tractor stores are more common.

Day 2: The whole state of Tennessee (no photos). Tornadoes carried off 16 tractor-trailers at 11 pm four nights before, killing dozens of people. All I saw four days later were the remains of ripped up trees along a half-mile stretch of route 40.

Day 3: Little Rock, AR
A visit with Nickel, an Arkansas native that I met at a campsite during my cross-country trip last fall. She took me hiking to the Pinnacle, a state park just outside of the capital.

Day 4: Henryetta, OK
Free dinner at the Pig Out Palace from a sketchy trucker, and a chat and a ride home from nice one.

Day 5: Albuquerque, NM
A roadtripper's sustenance: gas, a cheap motel, a good view. And fast food if all else fails.

Day 6: On Rt. 40 near Mt. Taylor, NM
In Albuquerque I saw Amy, Mike B. and Stephanie M., and then blew through the rest of New Mexico and all of Arizona in one afternoon and evening to miss the forecasted two-day snowstorm that hit early the next morning.

Day 7: Tulare, CA
I stopped at a diner to have a BLT. All of the employees were Mexican; they made my sandwich perfectly. After a bit of conversation, the 17-year-old waitress told me that she had thought I was a "guerita" (umlaut on the "u"). I didn't quite recognize the word (it's not used in Honduras, and in New Mexico it just means a blue-eyed girl). She told me it means a light-haired person who doesn't speak Spanish.

Day 8: Today, Sacramento. I have arrived.

Never Give Up

2008-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

At nearly 93 years old, my grandmother is one of those people in my life that I don’t know very well, but whom I admire greatly. Her husband, my grandfather, died 4 years ago. Though they were 8 years younger, my grandma’s twin brother and sister have both passed away well ahead of her. Due to debilitating osteoporosis, she has been wheelchair bound and lived alone in a nursing home for 6 years. Because of her deteriorated physical condition, for these past six years her existence has been confined to the nursing home wing reserved for only the most infirm, where my almost fully mentally capable grandma’s daily company consists of people who can barely speak, make eye contact or even feed themselves.

Despite circumstances that anyone would consider more than depressing, including slowly losing her mental faculties and most of her hearing, my grandma retains her sense of humor. An excerpt from today’s conversation at the nursing home cafeteria, over the routine Saturday lunch with my mom and grandma:

Grandma [cautiously optimistic]: Kemp (her son, who lives in California) called this week. He talked about coming to play cards with me!

Mom [reminding her]: Kemp always comes to visit you for his birthday at the end of January, Mother, remember? [Pauses, sees an opportunity to administer the weekly lunchtime senility test] Mother, how old is Kemp?

Grandma [thoughtfully]: 65.

Mom [winks at Suzanne and whispers]: He’s turning 66. [to Grandma]: Mother, how old are you?

Grandma [who has lost the thread of the conversation and is back to her chicken tarragon, looks up somewhat startled]: What?

Mom [leans in closer and raises her voice to a muted yell]: HOW OLD ARE YOU?

Grandma [chews, swallows, and considers the question]: 92.

Mom [encouragingly]: That’s right! [gets an evil glint in her eye] Mother, how old is Suzanne?

[Suzanne smiles weakly at Grandma]

Grandma [evaluates Suzanne’s appearance and throws out a number]: 25.

Mom [impressed, says to Suzanne]: Well, at least she didn’t think you were 15! [to Grandma] Mother, what age would you like to be?

Grandma [clearly]: 65.

Mom [surprised]: Why 65, mother? Why not 25?

Grandma [deadpans]: Because to be 25 again would be impossible.

* * *
I honestly didn’t expect to see my grandmother again when I left for Honduras three years ago. But now that I’m back in Maryland, I’ve been taking every chance I can get to soak up her company and some of her positive outlook. I want to have something to remember her by.

Don't even mention culture shock

2008-01-17T14:27:00.000-08:00

Eight days ago:

Today:

I believe that every place, every person and everything has its own beauty.

But still, I need a little help transitioning

from this:

to this!

Already

2007-12-28T18:22:00.000-08:00

I am back in Olanchito. Yesterday I woke up at 5 am to get a ride to the subway station. I rode the subway, mostly with early-rising construction workers in their winterized double-layered pants and thick hats, for an hour to get to National airport in DC. I waited in the airport for an hour until my first flight took off for Atlanta. Two hours later I was in Atlanta. During the two hours of layover I practiced my Spanish with a Dominican couple, though they had such a different accent that it took me a minute to confirm that they weren´t speaking another Caribbean language. Then I was in the air bound for Central America. On the flight I the majority of people, aside from a missionary group, were speaking Spanish. I continued warming up by conversing with the young woman next to me, who looked just like an Olanchito friends´sister. Four hours after taking off from Atlanta, I breezed through customs in San Pedro Sula. This being Honduras, they didn´t even collect my declaration form.

I rolled my suitcases past customs into the waiting lobby of the airport, where I was greeted by a temperature increase of about 25 degrees and a mob of several hundred excited Hondurans barely held back from the doors by standard-issue airport ribbon. I eagerly and anxiously looked for Willito, Sandra´s oldest brother, who had called me in the U.S. last night to tell me he would come pick me up. It was difficult to scan so many crowded faces at once to find his face, but finally I determined he wasn´t there yet. I sat down at an empty table in front of the Wendy´s in the lobby to wait for him.

It was hot. It smelled of summer. The sun shining through the windows of the lobby was so fluorescent I briefly, illogically thought it was artificial.

AND all two hundred people milling close-pressed around me were talking at once.

I watched mini-dramas take place as grown children were reunited with their parents, babies met their grandparents for the first time, and a Canadian woman I chatted with in Atlanta was reunited with her Honduran boyfriend. I thought to myself that I hadn´t imagined my own mini-drama happening for another few years.

Two hours and one encounter with a fellow former volunteer later, Willito arrived at the airport to pick me up in his friend´s car. His friend drove as fast as he could to get us to the bus station, but when we arrived we had already missed the last bus to Olanchito. So I stayed the night in an extra room at Willito´s aunt´s house in SPS, where he lives while finishing his architecture degree.

We spent the evening at the mall and driving around the zona viva of SPS. It was hot and the roads smelled of diesel. At every stoplight someone ragged approached the car, selling something cheap or simply begging. Willito´s friends gave money to many of them. Willito´s friends also barraged me with curious questions, and once they realized I could understand Spanish pretty well, started teasing me, too. When we returned to Willy´s aunt´s house, it wasn´t long before I fell dead asleep.

This morning we made it to the bus station in time to catch the bus to Olanchito. It isn´t so hot this time of year as it usually is on the north coast, so the five-hour ride was even pleasant. I watched the cane fields and mountains sweep by. Green beat in on me from all sides. When we pulled into the bus station in Olanchito, Sandra was there to meet me. We drove to her house and her mother immediately put huge piles of steaming rice and chicken, ripe cantaloupe slices and pineapple wine in front of Willito and me. I cleaned my plate. And then we all started talking.

I am back in the land of easy friendships, of heat, of people who live focused on how life feels rather than what life means. It is wonderful to be here.

Olanchito on YouTube

2007-12-26T19:38:00.000-08:00

I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of looking here before. These clips are all fairly poor quality, probably because they’re taken with cell phones. But oh, the cacophony of the drum-corps-and-xylophone marching band. The plastic chairs and teal-colored walls of a poorly-lit living room where teenagers sing along enthusiastically with a mediocre guitar player. The lush, overexposed outdoor shots, like of the swimming hole that I used to visit on weekends with Sandra's family, and of a speedboat ride down one of the canals of the wildlife refuge where I used to work (OK, this one wasn't filmed by a Honduran, but the greenery is incredible). And then there are the multiple (1, 2, 3) clips of people dancing, several while admiring themselves in front of mirrors (and well, they do look good). These are Hondurans at their finest: completely unselfconsciously sharing the joyful lifestyle they are proud of.

Tomorrow is definitely not too soon to be going back.

80 days continued...

2007-12-24T16:32:00.000-08:00

more about my travels from Maryland to the Rockies and back.

Five days = forever in Socorro: When I arrived in Socorro, which at first glance appears to be nothing more than a straight shot of two gas-stationed, fast food nation miles, I sincerely wondered to myself how I didn’t go insane for the three years I attended graduate school there. Even with my standards drastically lowered after living in the Third World, I can honestly say that humble Olanchito is more exciting than Socorro. Needless to say, this visit was supposed to be short, only long enough to see a few dear friends. But the Land of Entrapment being what it is, I was snared in central New Mexico for almost another week, and not without enjoyment.

For one, the Socorro area is still home to my longest-standing New Mexican friends. My visit began with several relaxing days with political activist friend Kathy and her husband Bear in their cozy cottage in downtown (poetic license used here) San Antonio. Seeing Kathy again was such a pleasure as she is a fascinating person, one of those who used to live out of a tent on Taos mountain back before I was born. Knowing what she knows about illness and herbal remedies, she quickly put me on bitter osha root tea. By the morning after arriving at her house, my laryngitis was clearing and I was speaking again. We had plenty to talk about and plenty of time to talk about it, given that she retired this past spring. Between my three days with Kathy and my earlier five weeks at home with my own retired parents, I have decided that retirement, which seems roughly equivalent to Peace Corps service, is the way to go. In that sense it’s too bad that I’m coming out of retirement instead of entering it.

A San Antonio sleepover wouldn’t be complete without a dawn dash to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge down the highway, which we managed on one groggy morning. Getting caught just below a huge honking flock of snow geese as they take off from the swamps is simply indescribable. The first time I went to a fly-out in 2003 and heard their wings flapping en masse from a mile away, I thought I had heard a car accident.

From Kathy and Bear’s, I migrated to Colombian friend Eliana’s place in Socorro proper. Rather, I should say Eliana and Brad’s place, since she has gotten married and bought a house since I last saw her. Not only that, but she is now a citizen! Eliana and I conversed comfortably in Spanish and in English, and it was interesting to discuss my time in Latin America with her since she knows, more than most anyone else I have spoken with since I left Honduras, what I am talking about.

In other moments I wandered around Socorro and the New Mexico Tech campus, seeking out more not-forgotten friends and former professors. One evening I attended a hydrology program guest lecture and dinner and met some of the new graduate students. One of them revealed that she also used to be in Peace Corps. She shared some entertaining reverse culture shock stories that were honestly a relief to hear, as painful as the experiences must have been for her at the time. Another afternoon I lunched at El Camino, my favorite Socorro diner, with Dave W., another activist friend. As usual, Dave flattered me by listening far more than he talked and by acting far more interested than he probably was. That is why I love lunching with Dave, especially over green chile enchiladas. On several other instances during the week I barged in on 73-year-old Dave G. at his house, often during his afternoon nap, but he always hospitably invited me in to lounge with him and his Mexican wife over tea and apple juice. At one point we even sat down at his electric piano and tried to run through a few jazz standards in remembrance of old times in the combo together, but my voice was still painful from the laryngitis recovery.

Socorro was slow and sunny and full of the love of old friends. A lot like Honduras, in fact. But everyone left to visit relatives for Thanksgiving, so I moved on, too.

As good as it gets in copper country: Though I had a basic road map laid out for myself when I left on this two-month-long trip, I ended up planning the day-to-day specifics on the fly. Hence I never anticipated spending Thanksgiving in a remote corner of southeastern Arizona in the copper mining town of Morenci. I also hadn’t hoped to be able to spend as much time as I did with Brazilian friend Vanessa, recently graduated with her masters and working, along with her new husband Karl, as a mining engineer there. In typical Vanessa fashion, she warmly welcomed me into her home, a small but comfortable company-owned two-bedroom house that she and Karl rent for $200/month (split between them, so they each pay $100/month). Her in-laws, her American “parents” and another friend all came in for the holidays as well, and the house was constantly filled with people and great smells coming from the kitchen. Vanessa can make something out of just about nothing, including tasty Brazilian dishes out of ordinary American ingredients and a vegetable garden out of a pile of rocks and desert sand. In that respect she is admirably like her mother, whom I remember with much affection from my visit to Brazil in 2004. More recently, I was heartbroken not to be able to attend her wedding this past summer because I was finishing my service in Honduras, but during my time in Morenci I felt almost compensated. For the two days after Thanksgiving, the we eight friends and family touristed around copper country together, including stops in Bisbee, Tombstone and the Chiricahua mountains. At the end of the holiday weekend I was the last to leave, which meant almost an entire day of last-minute catching up and even making cocada, a rich Brazilian coconut dessert that Vanessa made me fall in love with the first time she came to my house for dinner ages ago. Since then Vanessa and I have had a close friendship that, despite years of international distance, remains solid. It was particularly neat to see how we have grown more alike as she has become more American and I have become more Latina. Being with Vanessa was a wonderful way to spend Thanksgiving, and I’m so glad that fate had me celebrate with her. But eventually she had to return to work, and I had to be on my way.

Fly-by, New Mexico to North Carolina: After weeks of loafing around and only changing location every week or so, I finally had to scoot back to the east coast in order to make it home by December. Though decided upon somewhat arbitrarily, December 1st was the date I wanted to be back in Maryland so that I could have plenty of time to celebrate holiday season with my family. Given that I had only made it as far as (or rather, I had made it as far away as) Arizona by Thanksgiving, I had some very quick visits and some long days of driving ahead of me.

The first night of the long haul back was spent in Las Cruces, New Mexico with Kevin and Kathy. Also recently returned volunteers, they have both gone back to school to prepare for Peace Corps-inspired career changes. Both formerly engineers, they are now working toward more socially conscious futures as a teacher and a health professional, respectively. I have always liked Las Cruces for its ragged Organ mountain skyline and its rural Mexican feel, and I wish I could have stayed longer. As it was, Kathy made some hearty lentil soup that put me right to bed and the next morning I pushed on.

I made it all the way to San Antonio, Texas the next day. It was a long drive that left just enough time in the evening to go out for some authentic Mexican enchiladas with Andrea and Bernardo, another returned volunteer couple that I met while abroad. A stint in Honduras hasn’t held either of them back from the high-powered lives ahead of them, and Andrea is in law school while Bernardo works for a bank. But their career choices belie their down-to-earth natures and their obvious satisfaction with just being alive, and I enjoyed every minute we spent laughing together.

The third day on the road I drove to Austin. My younger brother Andy lives there, so I planned to spend a luxurious 24 hours with him before moving along. Andy is getting his PhD in computer science and starting up a small business with friends, and even he admits that the company he keeps is a bit limited in their choice of hobbies. So we took advantage of each other’s company to make a leisurely drive through the hill country out to Enchanted Rock. Said rock is actually a bulbous, hulking bare granite hill that we hiked to the top of, where we were surprised to discover numerous fresh water pools apparently formed and maintained only by rainwater. We tramped back and forth along its steep northern edge, searching for a cave labeled on the map but not finding it. We watched a biplane approach and perform a few loop-the-loop stunts in the sky above us. Then we sat and ate trail mix until sunset before heading back to the city for dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant. Later at the apartment, we companionably concurrently checked email on my brother’s two separate computers while watching my first episode of Tila Tequila on TV. Too bad she was already on her third-to-last show, but the plot line sure seemed more interesting than your average dating game.

The fourth day I left Austin for Houston, where my old friend Meghan is doing her post-doc in geology at Rice. She and her (new since Honduras) Australian husband Christian live in a modern loft apartment in a nice-looking part of town, within walking distance of (what else) a good Mexican restaurant. We headed there for dinner and could barely hear each other over the strains of a lone but emotive old mariachi, strumming guitar and serenading the inebriated young men at the table next to us. At one point he broke into “Sabor a Mi,” the first ballad I ever learned to sing in Spanish, so I sang along with him from our noisy corner of the room. One of the men at the other table noticed and smiled at me convivially. We were all impressed by such a persuasive voice coming from such a crumpled old man. After dinner I spent a few hours on the couch with Meghan and Christian, looking through their photos as they told me exciting tales of their past two years working and traveling in Australia and Africa. Unfortunately I had to go to bed early so I would have the endurance to cross at least three state borders the next day.

The next and fifth day, a Thursday, was the worst of the entire trip back. I had two days to get 1,200 miles in order to make it to dinner with friends on Friday in North Carolina. That made Thursday a 700-mile day. I drove out of Texas and into Louisiana under a bewildering morning cover of fog or haze, I’m not sure which. At the Louisiana border rest stop I pulled over for a map, and got out of my car to find myself face-to-face with at least 200 Mexican men milling about the grounds, all of whom immediately stared at me. I noticed two parked tour buses with their side panels raised, their guts spilling luggage. To break the tension I walked straight up to the nearest, youngest-looking man, addressed him in Spanish and asked curiously where they were all going. To work, he said, cringing away from me slightly and barely looking at me. Where? I asked. I don’t know, he replied, staring at his shoes. What kind of work will you be doing? I pressed on. All kinds of work, he said, eyeing me for the first time. I smiled. He didn’t. Where are you from? I continued. Mexico, he said, and stopped. But where in Mexico? I insisted. This, I knew, was the perfect inquiry to allow him to show off his regional pride and thereby reveal a little of himself to me. We are from all over, he replied, still cautious. Finally I breached the topic. So you have visas and everything? I queried. The government gave you visas? Yes, he said ruefully. We have visas. Good, I congratulated him. Those are hard to get. That’s good. He just looked at me. I let the conversation drop and went inside for a map. The other men, smoking and joking in clusters, ignored me as I approached until I politely addressed them in Spanish, group by group, pardoning my way through the crowd. Then they jumped out of my way as I passed and looked shocked, as if some unexpected friend had tapped them on the shoulder.

When I had nearly reached my car again after picking up my map, I approached the same young man, still trying to make friendly conversation. How long have you been on the road? Who paid for your trip? How long will you be traveling for? I asked him, still getting vague one-line answers in response. But then he began to ask me about myself. Are you sight-seeing? No, I said. I’m looking for a job, too (OK, so that had only been true in Denver). And I explained that I was from the capitol, far away, and that I had been traveling for two months. Oh, his eyes re-evaluated me. Oh.

Finally I wished him well, and he returned my good wishes. I got in my car and pulled away. I waved to the young man as I left. He waved back. He even smiled a little. I wondered what had happened since Mexico to take away the self-assured openness that I know most Latinos have in their home countries.

The rest of the day I drove. I drove across Louisiana, and then Mississippi, and into Alabama. I drove until I was too hungry to drive anymore, and then I stopped just short of Georgia. Opelika, Alabama was where I got a hotel, and ate at the unexpectedly chi-chi but nearly empty new Chinese restaurant next door, with the friendly Chinese owner who made sure to serve me her best green tea. I was kept up half the night by a mouse in my room (and at least three times in my BED) who couldn’t escape on his own and refused to get caught in any of the four mousetraps set up by the graveyard shift hotel attendant, until I finally switched into a smoking room (hack!) and immediately fell asleep under the fetid sheets.

The goal of the sixth day, Friday, was to reach North Carolina. I made it to Durham just in time to catch dinner and a holiday concert with Daniel, an Uruguayan-American friend I had met in Honduras, and his new wife Wendy. Daniel, an avid wildlife biologist pursuing his PhD at Duke, was the one who first introduced me to the staff of the Cuero y Salado wildlife refuge, located near where I used to live on the north coast of Honduras. Thanks to Daniel’s connection, during my volunteer service I ended up working on a grant-writing project to NOAA (an environmental research arm of the U.S. government) on behalf of the refuge. During this very trip, I found out that our proposal was successful and the funds we requested have indeed been granted, supporting implementation of the first-ever comprehensive water quality study of the rivers and mangrove estuaries there. I only wish I were still living there to see the project through, though I know that it is really the Honduran personnel’s responsibility now.

After quick gyros and falafel at a Middle Eastern place near campus, we rushed over to the Duke chapel where the university choir and orchestra were performing Handel’s Messiah. Despite being a concert choir member for a good part of my adult life before Honduras, I had never sung or even heard the Messiah performed before. I thoroughly enjoyed my first taste of live classical music since returning from abroad, as well as being part of a centuries-long tradition when the entire audience rose in the middle of the piece for the Hallelujah chorus.

The next morning, before hitting the road for the last day of my trip, I drove over to Raleigh for breakfast with my former graduate school officemate Mike and his wife Rose, perhaps the only spouse on the entire trip that I had already met. Mike and Rose both have reliable careers that interest them, and are now homeowners as well. They are one of the most well-established young couples I know, and I wouldn’t expect anything different of them. They had chosen a perfect spot to fuel up for my drive: a southern diner with good grits! Yum.

By noon I was on the road headed home. It was a time-honored drive, one that I used to do multiple times a year with my family when my grandparents lived in Raleigh. My memories are not of driving, though, but of playing license plate alphabet tag and fighting over the back seat space with my brother. And of the miles and miles of pine trees along the Carolina highway.

And then I was at home in Maryland, just in time to attend a dinner party my mother was throwing.

It has been long trip.

I see so much of my past everywhere. Yet I have missed so much since I have been gone. All the same, I am so proud of my friends who are making their own ways in the world as we reach, continue through and complete adulthood. I am proud of my friends who don’t have TVs, who grow their own vegetables and hunt their own meals, and who avoid their cars as much as possible. I am proud of my friends who, when I sit down to talk with them, say that what they most wish for is a peaceful, healthy place to work and be with family. As I re-enter life in the United States, I recognize little bits of Honduras in almost everything, including that wish. Americans have work and health; Hondurans have peace and family and a different kind of health. Hondurans watch American movies on pirated cable and want what Americans have; Americans want what they don’t realize that most of the world already has.

Someday our own little realms will be enough, and we will all be satisfied.

Around the World in 80 Days

2007-12-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I haven’t been all the way around the world since my last post, or even since I set off on my travels 73 days ago. But I have been over halfway across the States. Highlights since my last post:

Vacationing on the Front Range: The geology conference was over, but I still had interviews scheduled as well as some time to kill in Denver before my friend in Fort Collins, my next stop, returned from vacation. In between the job interviews, I made friends with Virginia, one of only two other women staying at the hostel and the only woman my age. From Luxembourg, Virginia had recently succeeded in the green card lottery and was anticipating settling into her first U.S. job as a ski resort pass vendor for the winter. She is incredibly friendly and her English is impeccable, and we made good company for each other to the Denver Art Museum downtown on the first Saturday in November. Virginia also accompanied me on several visits to fellow returned Peace Corps volunteers Jim and Colleen, who since coming back from Honduras have temporarily crashed at a friend’s empty apartment in the city. We happened to be in town for the closing night of Colleen’s art and photography exhibit at one of Denver’s private galleries, so we imbibed wine and sliced cheese onto crackers like the best of them and admired Colleen’s images of Honduran women and children. Another night we reviewed J & C’s personal Honduras photos over dinner at their place as Jim ran through a deadpan narrative of the annual India Bonita pageant (what Jim explains as 5-year-olds in Vegas showgirl outfits) in the village they used to live in.

After a week and a half in relative peace in my drafty back room of the hostel, things started to get crazy. A bunch of young American men had taken the place over, and though they were fun, they were drinking heavily every evening, thereby leading to problems every morning. Once I was startled out of my morning yoga poses by a Denver city fire marshal pounding on my door to make sure I hadn’t burst into flames. I took that as a compliment until I found out later that one of the less-than-sober tenants, who had been forcibly thrown out that day, had taken revenge by calling the cops and telling them that there was a dead body hidden in the hostel basement. I knew then it was time to go.

I left Denver heading north on the first Monday in November, after yet another job interview. Less than two hours later I was in Fort Collins, enjoying a free beer flight at the New Belgium Brewing Company (they make Fat Tire, yum) with Agnes and her boyfriend Jared. After getting more than sufficiently drunk (I’m talking about myself, now), Jared drove us back to his house, where he cooked us a fabulous game bird dish. He had procured the main ingredient (pheasant?) with help from his adorable and apparently very functional lady black Lab retriever a few days earlier on a hunt in Montana. Respect is what I have for that dog, and Jared, and Agnes, did I mention her? I still remember the time that Agnes stopped by the Bay area to see Heather L. when we were living there way back in the spring of 2001. I was lucky enough to have her company for a day when Heather had to be at work, and we went on an 11-mile hike at Point Reyes with Ben, Eric and Brynn. I remember that by the end of the day the two guys had pulled way ahead of us girls, probably because 1) this was Agnes’ first hike since she had been in recovery from serious ankle injuries sustained years earlier, 2) Brynn had just run a marathon the day before, and 3) I was training to hike the John Muir trail that summer and was loaded with a full backpack. Despite our inferior speed, I don’t think any of us females felt weak that day.

After yet another solar-powered Rocky Mountain day spent wandering the Colorado State University campus where Agnes is finishing her doctorate, and my first meeting ever with web friend and Honduran expat Oscar and his wife, I headed back south. It turns out that my childhood friend and former across-the-street neighbor in Maryland, Beth, has since relocated to Colorado Springs along with her parents. Beth and her family have always been more than generous to me, and their place and company were perfect for a stopover on my way back to New Mexico.

I very much enjoyed my two weeks in beautiful Colorado, but I left with the opinion that I had definitely been on vacation. I will not be back there to live.

Back in Albuquerque, more fun than the first time: This second visit was supposed to be short and sweet, to catch up with just a few friends I hadn’t seen the first time around. But I almost couldn’t leave! Pete and Diane gave me not only their guest bedroom (sans bed but with the most comfortable floor and warmest pile of blankets ever) but also hosted dinner after dinner for my friends, whom they hadn’t even met until that week. Unfortunately, the alcohol in Fort Collins had a wretched effect on me, and by the time I reached P & D’s I had the flu and a nearly fatal case of laryngitis that lasted the entire time I was in Albuquerque. No matter, Pete called all my friends for me to invite them over, including friends that I hadn’t been in touch with for years. I had the enjoyment of listening to more than one conversation along the lines of this:

Suzanne dials a number on her cell phone. It starts to ring on the other end. She blithely tosses it to Pete.

Suzanne’s friend on the other end (answers): Hello?

Pete (in a friendly voice): Hello, this is Pete…

Friend (nonplussed): Who?

Pete (patiently): Pete. I’m a friend of Suzanne’s, remember her? The one who sang in the jazz combo/studied hydrology/didn’t bother to call you for three years?

Friend (remembering): Right, of course I do! What ever became of that loser anyway?

Pete (diplomatically): Actually, she’s in town this week, and she’d love to invite you to dinner at my house! She has laryngitis, so that’s why I’m calling you, but she’d love to get together and talk about old times!
----
In fact, the laryngitis episode led to many interesting conversations, including this one at Sadie’s with Mike B.:

Mike and Suzanne are sitting next to each other at a small table in the empty back room of a New Mexican restaurant, after the noise of the lunch-hour rush has come and gone.

Mike (smiles engagingly): So, what have you been doing since I last saw you? It’s been, like, forever!

Suzanne (smiles back excitedly and says):

Mike (leans in to hear her better): I mean, what did you do in the Peace Corps for two years, anyway?

Suzanne (struggles as her mouth flaps open and shut):

Mike (tries to lip read): Um… did you like it?

Suzanne (shouts): Oh, it was a great experience!

Mike (whispers back): I’m so glad!
----

Not to be put off by muteness, this second Albuquerque visit also included dinner at Stephanie and Aaron’s with Stephanie’s famous simple green salad that I so love, super pupusa night in the South Valley with Salsa Dave and every kind of pupusa imaginable, a few nights of drinks, seeing Maria, a desert hike to some bizarre salt springs, and a 5 am Frontier run. Of course I couldn’t leave without a surprise dinner visit to my New Mexican family: Pat, Steve, their daughter Aurora and a small collection of roomies, family members and neighbors that they perpetually surround themselves with. Pat plied me with multiple cups of steaming herbal tea for my throat, Aurora cooked (and she can cook) pasta carbonara and we crowded the long wide dining room table just like we used to when I lived with them. Luckily Pat, Steve and Aurora could carry the conversation and finish off the wine just fine between the three of them, which they did quite efficiently when they weren’t staring at me and exclaiming that they wished I could talk. I left all too early, and tearfully, as Aurora and Pat hugged me tight. Because of them, I know New Mexico will always be home, too.

Next stop: Socorro, points south and Route 10. To be continued...

One for the Road

2007-11-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

I am three weeks into the second western road trip of my life. These road trips that bookend my time in Honduras and buffer it from cruel, soothing routine.

I have been in Denver proper for almost a week now at the same slightly dirty but very friendly hostel in a century-old neighborhood within walking distance of downtown. Rotting Victorian houses in all corners of the country have successfully beckoned to me over my past decade of rental history, so I feel right at home walking up the hostel's creaky staircase and sleeping in a room with drafty windows and doors every night. There is also a virtually unoccupied computer in the basement, so after a month of bumming Internet time at public libraries and friends' houses I finally have a little time to write. Really, I haven't written solely for lack of time. I have also been alternately too relaxed, too anxious or simply too living-in-the-moment to focus on any one of the million vagaries of life of each passing day and write about them.

My trip started on the second Thursday in October. I started a day late, not really wanting to leave Maryland, though I had committed myself to travelling west to reconnect with the people and places of my most recent American and most complete professional existence before Honduras. For the first time in my life, I cried when I left my parents' house, though my mother didn't see it because I try not to cry in front of her, especially when she is already crying. I was scared to pick up and change my life all over again, which scared me in itself because it is completely out of character for me to be afraid of change. But I couldn't remember the last time that I had travelled totally solo. Of course in Honduras I had done so extensively, but that was always on public transportation and not alone in my car. And in Honduras it is nearly impossible to ever truly be alone. Hondurans are too nosy and too empathetic to let any stranger pass more than 10 silent minutes before engaging them in conversation, whether on the bus, in a hotel lobby or at a restaurant. But I am back in the States, where everyone drives alone, pumps and pays for their gas without even talking to an attendant, and stays alone in hotel rooms with sound-proof walls and windows. I hoped that I was still American enough to stand not having substantial company for days on end.

I drove the first hour out of the DC metro area watching the mid-fall leaves bluster off the Beltway trees and brush my windshield. I listened to the last of the Latino radio station, which I knew would cut out once I crossed into the mountains. After speaking or hearing Spanish every day since I had been back in the States, as I headed into the heartland I wasn't sure how many days would pass before I would be able to do either again.

I drove on. As static stacattoed the last bachata, blue hills and blue sky rolled out before me. I remembered that my first childhood sight of mountains were these eastern ones. They are so beautiful.

And so began the first of a series of ordinary, revelatory days on the road.

That day I drove two-thirds of the Blue Ridge parkway through Shenandoah National Park. It was cold and smelled of snow. Even so, I stopped at the park restaurant to order the special, the blackberry ice cream pie (like lemon meringue pie, but with blackberry ice cream instead of the lemon goo). I wolfed the whole thing down in front of a roaring fire in the park lodge, next to a woman in a rocking chair pretending to read a book and a family playing cards with their young boys.

The next day included being propositioned (separately) by both a black man and a Latino man out of their respective cars as I was walking along the main street of some small town in Tennessee after checking into my hotel. I wondered if I was really back in the States yet.

The day after that I camped in the Ozarks, which for personal reasons had been the main goal of the five days of my trip out. As I approached the mountains, I looked at my very vague map of the area and picked a campground based on the fact that it was closest to one of the wilderness areas there. It being fall and the weather getting crisp, I assumed that the campground would be empty. It turned out that I got one of the last campsites available. After pitching my tent and taking an easy 2-hour hike alone along the stream valley where the campground was located, I re-entered the campground to be immediately invited to share homemade chili cooked over a campfire with Cokey Whitecotton and his grown children and their children and all of their friends. Cokey, who was already drunk but obviously the kind of guy who is friendly no matter his degree of inebriation (or lack thereof), passed me cold canned American beers and whittled me flowers and roosters out of sticks and bragged about his wife's homemade pickles, which he forced on me one after another without respite (they were good). He let me drive his new ATV around the campsite even though I told him I had never even been on an ATV before. Two of his family friends took me to a big hollow sycamore in the forest just outside the campground. They made me stand inside it with them for a photo. We returned to the fire and Cokey told me that he could find arrowheads in a 2-acre plowed-under field because they were like magnets to his Indian blood. We ate some more chili. The fire snapped in the cold night air. One of his grandchildren climbed in his lap and asked him to tell a monster story. Cokey gamely made one up. Everyone listened. Then he made up another. And another. Then the stories became reminiscences of hunting trips gone wrong, but hilariously so. His daughter claimed that her son had seen a ghost when he was four years old. Cokey claimed to have seen the chupacabras.

Again, I wondered if I had really returned to the United States.

After s'mores (the first real ones in two and a half years!) and a trek in the dark to the creek with the whole group to observe the firefly larvae glowing greenly at the water's edge, I said goodnight to Cokey and his family. He laughingly chastised me for not continuing the night's adventures as they went off into the woods again to find phosphorescent fungus. Then he smiled and asked me what I was going to tell my friends in Washington about the Arkies. He didn't seem worried that it would be bad. I thanked him and his wife, and they hugged me and told me to look them up the next time I came through the area. Just go into town once you get out of the mountains, Cokey said. Stop at the first gas station 2 miles in and ask for directions to Cokey Whitecotton's place, he directed. Make sure to come back and visit us. We'll be waiting for you.

I woke up the next morning expecting to break my tent down and get on the road as soon as possible, especially since I didn't have any palatable breakfast food with me. But before I could even make it to the latrine, the four women at the site next to mine invited me to breakfast. I gratefully shared their hot chocolate and bacon and eggs. As we chatted, I found out that they were part of an unofficial women's outdoor group from Little Rock, the Arkansas capital two hours away. They invited me on the hike they were planning to take that morning. I hesitated for a moment...and accepted. It didn't really matter what time I got on the road, anyway.

The waterfall we ended up hiking to had been rendered to a pithy drip by this year's drought, but I ran under it in mock fear to encourage it a little. The Arkansas ladies laughed and more photos were taken. By the time I got back on the road around 1 pm, I had decided that I love Arkansas.

That night I camped in a rainy redrock canyon in western Oklahoma. By the next day I had made it to New Mexico.

Then followed a blurred week in Albuquerque, though I remember it included a long-awaited stay with Amy at her adobe two-bedroom near the university, a pleasant reunion with the people that I used to work with (and an informal job offer), and nightly reminiscences with fellow former volunteer Salsa Dave about baleadas and all the illnesses he inflicted on me during the three weeks we lived together back in 2005 during my first months in Honduras. I was surrounded by friends new and old the entire time I was there, but I couldn't shake the heart-curdling loneliness that was the reason I left three years ago. So I left again, still planning to pass through on my return trip to catch up with friends I hadn't yet had time to see, but relieved to be moving on.

Next, a week in Boulder and its mountains with Brittany, her cousin Christy and husband Wolf, their monstrous sweet dogs Aeolian (Malamute) and Torrent (Newfoundland), and any number of friends that Brittany seems to pick up everywhere she goes. We harvested vegetables at the cooperative farm that Christy and Wolf belong to, and brought home an entire refrigerator shelf's worth of the last produce of the season. We cooked fantastic eggs Benedict and squash soup and green chile carrots in Christy and Wolf's canyon house amongst the yellowing aspens. We strolled U of Colorado's campus below the flatirons on one of the sunniest days in the history of mankind. I challenged Torrent to a wrestling match since he and I are, at least until Torr grows up, in the same weight class. Our next-to-last night together, we barhopped through the high-altitude hick towns in a gigantic pickup truck: in Ward we were invited to homemade healing coffee concotions pulled by a mountain man with land in Jamaica where brooms are planted and grow into fenceposts (after living in Honduras I know that this is not only possible but inevitable); in Nederland we were first befriended and then cursed by a local psychic. It was sad to say goodbye when Brittany and her travelling buddy Laura had to fly back to Minneapolis where they live. But then Jhon came down from Casper and back into my life for the first time in over a year. Our weekend together was short, but we did a lot of talking in the bars and cafes of Boulder, and took a lovely hike to my namesake, icy Mills Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

And now, Denver. It has been a fun but overwhelming four days attending the GSA conference, being thrown back into geologic jargon, talks scheduled at 15-minute intervals for five days straight, and collecting and handing out dozens of business cards. I am grateful for the numerous friends and mentors who consider it their duty to help me in my job search, even after being out of touch for nearly three years. I am grateful for the new faces now in my life, for singing a few standards with the man playing jazz piano at the hotel bar across from the convention center one night, and for the good-natured battle of wits with the black guy on the 20 bus line between my hostel and downtown who feeds the homeless although he looks like something the cat dragged in (his own words) and calls me hard to hold onto because I'm the Snakey Sag(ittarius).

I'm staying in Colorado for another week or so to wrap up some job interviews, and then I'll start the return trip to Maryland. I'm hoping to see friends in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Mississippi and North Carolina before reaching DC around Thanksgiving. I'm hoping I'll return home with more clarity. Although I think it will take more than the next month to achieve that, I do know that at least I have my hope. And my home.

Finds

2007-09-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

…at the Latin American Market in Takoma Park yesterday with Heather L., with reviews:

* Horchata drink mix: Appropriately only slightly sweet and very chalky. Rating: 5 piropos (excellent).

* Queso duro, hard white salty cheese: Crumbly but strangely creamy, which somehow makes it better than, if not as authentic as, the Honduran variety. The package did say it was from El Salvador. 4 piropos (very good).

* Casabe, a form of melba toast made of cassava flour: Just as stale and bland as the best campo variety. I’m used to eating it packaged as the more flavorful chips, though. Will have to experiment with cooking techniques to bring this item up to par. However, buying casabe did win me points in the eyes of the Dominican cashier, who promptly started speaking to me in Spanish as soon as she rang it up. 4 piropos.

* “Central American” red beans: As of yet untested, but the package features a picture of Francisco Morazan, the Honduran-born first president of the Central American Union in the early 1800’s. 5 piropos (package rated only)

Given the name of the store, Heather spent her entire time at the market looking for a Latin American “para llevar,” but I had to remind her that 1) she is married, and 2) Latin American men only come in 3-packs (i.e. with wife and child by said wife) so she should spend her money on a wiser investment.

Our next stop was the Safeway one block down the street, which surprisingly had all of the above finds as well as both corn and flour tortillas packaged by a Latin American exporter (as opposed to the uncooked-tasting varieties packaged by US-based companies). We also made sure to buy Heather’s husband, Michael, a bottle of Inka Kola in honor of their travels in Ecuador and Peru a decade ago. My new discovery is that Inka Kola tastes just like the Honduran Mirinda brand of banana-flavored soda (which I despise with a passion). Ah, the unexpected benefits of living in the Latinoland that is the DC area.

Back at home in the Nation's Capitol

2007-09-05T21:35:00.000-07:00

Home. The Washington, D.C. area is home for me even though I haven’t lived here for 12 years. It is home even though I don’t have a single childhood friend left here anymore.

It is home because although I don’t know anyone, I know everyplace. The community pool where I swam and flopped on the grass every afternoon of all my childhood summers. The park where I used to walk my dog and watch the sunset, even in winter. The church where I was baptized at 6 months old, and where I was confirmed 16 years later. The grocery store that is just as full of African and Latino and Asian immigrants and is just as dilapidated as it was when I used to live here.

It is home because everyone I had forgotten still remembers me. My parents’ neighbors. The woman whose 8-year-old (now 23-year-old) son I used to babysit for. The director of the youth theater program at church. They remember me and welcome me back, even if they don’t recognize me at first.

I made so many memories here, with so many people who have gone as well as a few who are still around. We are all made of the pain of memories: the bad ones that make us bitter and the good ones that bring a stinging nostalgia for that which we have lost or outgrown. But for the first time in my life, my memories here don’t hurt. My childhood is so far in the past that now it is just a story to tell. And it is a story to revel in because I am still around to tell it.

First Things First

2007-09-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

The first thing I did upon stepping foot in the Houston International airport, even before crossing customs: took a long drink of tap water from the public water fountain.

I waded through all of the customs lines and then went to the bathroom. It was spotlessly clean. I flushed my paper down the toilet without thinking twice.

I walked slowly through the first magazine stand I passed, noticing all the snacks I had forgotten I loved: sesame sticks. Dried apricots. Ten varieties of chocolate bars. I didn’t buy any of them for fear they would make me sick. I bought a Harper’s instead.

I walked up to a deli in the food court and bought a turkey sandwich with a huge piece of raw lettuce. I took the lettuce out and ate it separately, before eating the rest of the sandwich.

I observed the people sitting at the tables around me. Something was missing. It was not so much a lack of black people as a lack of people with black hair. Even the four women speaking Spanish at the table in front of me all had lightened their hair to an ambiguous auburn.

I got up from my table and threw my trash away. I walked as slowly as I could to my airport gate, purposely paying more attention to the people around me than to where I was actually walking. I had an entire hour until my plane took off.

I managed to walk past my gate twice without realizing it; I arrived just 10 minutes before take-off. I didn’t realize that I had almost missed my flight until I boarded the plane and noticed that I was the last one to reach my seat. I didn’t worry about it.

Going through customs in Houston, the official asked me what I had been doing in Honduras. “I was a Peace Corps volunteer there,” I explained. He asked me how long I had lived there. “ Over two years,” I informed him.

“Welcome home, ma’am,” he said, and smiled. I smiled back. I wanted to cry. Out of happiness.

2007-09-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

This blog continued from Suzanne in Honduras