Oldies!

Woah.

The feeling of separation that hits you when the oldies leaves hurts more the second year.

I imagine it's probably because I only spent about two months with the other oldies, and I spent a year and two months with these guys.

The first day that the oldies weren't around, the house felt absurdly empty. During a bit of free time that day and during Holy Hour, I wrote down some things. Reading over them again, those things are not particularly positive. I think it reflects how overwhelmed I felt in the moment, both imagining what it would look like for the eleven people who stayed here to suddenly be doing all of the work when nine people got into the car and left, and imagining what it would be like to not have those people around for the times when you have questions about how to manage your new job, when you want to be able to turn to another person and say, "I'm not being crazy, right? That's a weird thing that our community does!", when you want somebody else to agree to participate in an event you'd like to organize, when you want enough people at holy hour to hold a tune together, when you need to know how to say a word in Spanish, when you want to play a game of american football, when you want to watch a good movie on [once every two weeks] movie night and everyone else is voting for something silly, when you want to try and steal a chicken from one of the kids on his or her way back from the bodega, or when you want to throw oranges at house two and/or its inhabitants.
Those are times I'm going to miss.

I think those are the moments you carry with you in your head until they fade with time and/or are replaced by the experiences you have with those still around you. Some of those new experiences have already happened, but there are more yet to come. You've just gotta figure out how to pick yourself up back off the ground and keep on keeping on till the memory of those oldies is simply fond, not sad!

We cleaned the house Thursday, and again yesterday, and somebody made the intelligent observation: "We may not be able to help whether or not the oldies left, but we are able to help what our house looks like!" Oddly enough, cleaning the house, for me, fit into that category of new experiences to ease the pain.

Okay, I gotta run, but I'm actually doing fine guys, even if it doesn't sound like it!

Fake Blog Posts

So I suppose first I'd like to thank you all for coming to this meeting. I think we're all in agreement that at this point it makes sense that, instead of actually producing any feasible blog post, we've dropped down to the level of simply making a list of the potential blog posts that could have been written in the past several months, had time been more readily available.

Having said that, please let me present you with the options:

1. The rat killing competition.

The rat problem in our house grew out of control right around the time that the newbies got here. They, less accustomed to living in such squalor, got our act together for us, since we didn't seem like we were going to, and organized a two-week-long competition to see which group of missionaries could trap and kill the most rats. I, as one of those omega males who can't stand the sight of killing things and has at least at one point in my life been a vegetarian, struggled with this competition. My team proved reasonably capable both at trapping rats through ingenious construction of awesome traps and at remaining humble, but we struggled in the actually-disposing-of-said-trapped-rats department. In the end we managed to lose 50L (lempira), or about $2.50 to the team of Kevin (Kuehl, not me) and Harrison, aided by the fact that the latter of the two seemed to have no semblance of a moral quandary regarding doing away with the rats.

This blog post, were it to be written by someone who was actually good at doing the whole blog production thing, would've come complete with photos of all of the different types of traps constructed over the course of the weeks, from the "Look! Here's some food floating on an island in the middle of water too deep for you to stand up in! You should probably come get it!" traps to the "I don't know... let's just put a giant bag over the hole where they come in and hope for the best?". Thorough readers could be left pondering both the best way to capture rats too intelligent for normal traps and what it is about the soap in the mens' bathroom that the rats find attractive (besides its disuse).

2. Graduation of 9th grade

The 9th grade class this year consisted of six kids who will be heading off into the world next year, having completed the first stage of their academic career. The hope is that all of them will continue on into higher education, but the nature of the Honduras education system and the opportunities available to these kids don't necessarily dictate that as the next step. Perusers (people who peruse?) might actually get a chance to see one of those elusive photos of the writer and his 9th grade math students, or at least those of them who still liked him enough to be willing to be seen in a photo with him, and would be provided with the opportunity to ponder the relationship between education and opportunity in the third world.

3. House 3 and banana plantation injustice.

As part of their afternoon activities schedule, Kit decided to work with house 3 to create a business selling topogigos, a fancy delicacy here in Honduras also known as frozen koolaid in a baggie. Since taking Zuko or Tang (the two Honduran Koolaid companies) packets (4L or 20 cents each), mixing them with water (free), and pouring them into a baggie (no idea) is a relatively cheap process, topogigos tend to sell for quite cheap, on the order of 1L (5 cents). House 3 and Kit, because they're brilliant, decided to try selling them for 2L each instead. That worked.

Anyway, so think of a lemonade stand where they give you koolaid in baggies instead of lemonade in cups, but where the liquid is actually frozen solid if you get there early enough and mostly liquid if you don't. Then think of the most obnoxious group of kids you've ever seen trying to sell something to adults... I'm thinking of some girl scouts in front of a Walmart I used to know. First sad, then pushy, then even angry, all a series of emotions carefully designed to weigh on the potential consumer until he or she realizes that for the sake of these young children's well-being, he or she must not, at all costs, ever purchase anything from them when they're acting like that. Then envision that you discover that these kids want you to purchase their products, but really what they want you to do is to purchase their products for them. Aka Sample House 3 Boy wants me to pay 2L to his store in order to allow Same Sample House 3 Boy to eat/drink Sample House 3 Boy's product. Here's the other thing... I wasn't present during any success they may've had with this strategy, but I have no doubt that it worked. Through these actions they also clearly demonstrated their business savvy by showing that they were disciplined enough to not eat all of their profits, or atleast without making other people pay for it.

Kit realized that, as our kids aren't allowed to have cash, she needed to come up with another way for them to use the 85L received during their sale. I use "85L received" because this can and should be distinguished from profits, an astute observation made by Kit, who promptly reminded the kids that the supplies for their business cost 40L. I'm pretty sure she actually just took those supplies from our house, and while they very well may've cost 40L, I don't think anybody noticed their absence nor has any interest in recuperating that loss. That leaves 45L divided amongst six house 3 boys. At the end of the sale, Kit offered the kids the opportunity to eat their profits. I believe the way in which this was communicated was "You can, if you'd like, spend your part of the money on buying topogigos of your own from the leftovers." Another astute reader will, at this point, clearly point out the flaw that casa 3 failed to see in this logic. If supplies for all of the topogigos that they made cost 40L, and there are 30 extra topogigos left over, the members of house 3 have actually made a profit of 7.5L and 5 topogigos each. Unfortunately house 3 fell into the logical trap placed before them and, in their eagerness to participate in the consumption of said topogigos, allowed themselves to purchase them, presumably from Kit, using their own profits, until their financial resources, so recently acquired, were thoroughly exhausted. At the end of the day Kit went home with 85L in her pocket, the kids went home happy, and the rest of the people who purchased topogigos went home, some with topogigos, and all slightly less beat-up than they would've otherwise been had they not purchased topogigos.

"So where, in all this, does banana plantation exploitation come into play?" As a good blog reader, you will have remembered that the title did make such an allusion. Depending on how much attention was paid to the previous paragraph, one might have already identified the connection. If not, the blog post would here lay out the situation of the lowly plantation worker and the existence of the company store, the only place in the surrounding area where workers could purchase supplies, supplies consistently set at unreasonable prices. Such a setup allowed all of the money distributed for labor done to consistently flow back into the company. This was also common in the West during gold rushes and many mining operations.

In an effort to avoid continuing the cycle of exploitation of the workers, bloggers might also request knowledge of the whereabouts and whatsitgonnabeusedfors of the 85L in question in Kit's topogigo pyramid scheme. She (and I) would like to ensure everyone that she's using the 85L for arts and crafts activities with house 3.