A Brief Visit Home

Disclaimer: This blog post was published in April of 2014. I started to write this blog post about 10 months ago, but since I never finished and it seems strange to me to go back and fill in where I didn't complete what I'd wanted to say, I'm just going to hit publish and rely on google's tool that allows me to pick a time and date for when it should've been published.


Hola! I'm back in the states for a brief vacation!

For Hondurans, the school year runs from February to November.

You may be wondering how those two statements are compatible. Never fear, I'm about to tell you about it.


For those of us (the missionaries) who are teachers, it turns out that pretty much the only time available to go on vacation is during the school year.

That sounds vaguely oxymoronic, but well, here I'd like to give a shout out to the University of Notre Dame's International Summer Service Learning Program (ISSLP), a spectacular program run by those wonderful people at the Center for Social Concerns. The ISSLP pairs ND students up with international service organizations for a summer. We're one of those organizations, and we're quite grateful to welcome two rising ND juniors(?), James and Carolyn, to the Finca for the summer.

One of those two lucky individuals is currently down in Honduras trying to decipher my extensive and probably convoluted (but hopefully completely clear) lesson plans, and is well into his or her second week of covering my classes. Thank you kind and good sir or ma'am! You are a gentleperson and a teacher of scholars.


Going on vacation means stepping away from a project that I've been heavily involved in for nearly a year. I live where I work, and as the place is quite different from the states, my thoughts on my experiences down there can often feel very much like a dream. However, stepping away can give one a different and perhaps, better, perspective.

I won't go into terrible detail on all of my thoughts regarding the Finca, primarily because most of you would be bored. As a result, I'm pulling the ol' switcheroo and changing up entirely the direction it seemed I was going. I'll instead make two lists, one of the things that I really missed and/or talked about incessantly while at the Finca, and things that I miss about the Finca now that I'm back in the states. I'll try and hit all the cliches on the head.

List #1: Things I Missed (or at least thought I did) From The States
1. Shakes (half off after 8 pm)
2. Mexican food (sounds silly but true)
3. Hot (or even mildly warm) showers (First one in ten months!)
4. My pre-finca friends (this one's accurate)
5. The ability to watch a movie whenever I so desired (turns out I don't care that much about most movies anymore)
6.



I'm back in the United States for about a month! If you'd like to talk to me during that time, feel free to shoot me an email! I'm sure if you'd like to talk to me, chances are pretty decent I'd like to talk to you as well!

Oatmeal Candy Cane Cookies

I've been unofficially reprimanded about my blog. Not by the Finca, of course, but by friends. Yes, you. You crazy people out there, with your unlimited access to the internet. I'm trying, I swear!

Having said that, one of the complaints was entirely justified. It was pointed out to me that it might be nice if the kids made it into the posts occasionally. Well said.

Taking that into consideration, first I´m going to explain what a pila is:

A pila is basically the Honduran sink. It has a relatively deep section of standing water on the left for use when we don´t have water (about 30% of the time), and a pana (basically a plastic bowl) with which to draw that water. Because we use this water to watch our dishes, we try and make sure it stays as clean as possible... aka, we don´t put anything besides the pana into it.


Sorry for that random, (not) unrelated diversion. Back to talking about getting kids into posts occasionally, here's a brief tale of some cookies:


The Scene:
The Missionary Household

The Characters:
Cati, age 7
Kimberly, age 9
Kevin #2 (also known as Kevincito or Kevincio), first year (aka inexperienced) missionary, with ganas (aka in the mood) to make his family's traditional Christmas cookies

(this probably sounds much more exiting in my head than it does on paper... I'm envisioning someone reading it in one of those voices from movie trailers)

A thought comes into young Kevin's head. "I'm going to continue the family tradition of making oatmeal candy cane cookies!" Such a simple thought.

Poor guy.

The Sala of the Missionary House, thirty minutes later.

There are now two young Casa Uno girls with Kevin, excited and eager to bake. As Kevin pulls out the supplies, the younger of the two, Cati, allows her eagerness to assist to overwhelm her. While our unsuspecting protagonist´s back is turned, our dear niña begins to spread manteca all over her hands in order to grease the mixing bowl (not explicitly necessary), a process she completes with surprising rapidity.

Suddenly overwhelmed by the uncleanliness of her hands and the recommendation of a surprised Kevin that perhaps she shouldn´t have started yet, she proceeds to the pila (see above if you weren´t paying attention) and dunks her hands into the (previously clean(ish)) water. When kindly albeit hurriedly requested to remove her hands from said location, she promptly complies, choosing instead to take the more sanitary route of grabbing an unclean cup out of the sink side and dunking it (along with her hand) into the pila, in order to obtain water with which to clean her hands.


Again caught unawares, Kevin fails to notice that behind this, Kimberly is managing to spread flour all over places that have no business having any flour spread over them, e.j. the floor, the benches, the table, and last but not least, Kimberly´s face. She also accidentally manages to get a bit into a measuring cup, so our adventurers toss that into the bowl and proceed adelante.

Cue other similar happenings for nearly two hours. Possible topics that might be discussed:

- Kimberly´s complete refusal to attempt to form the mix into bakeable items on the cookie sheets, coupled with Cati´s refusal to make her attempts look anything like candy canes ("Kevin, we´re going to bring the ones that look like candy canes back to Casa Uno. ¡You can have the ones that spell my name!").
- The disappearance of one of Kevin´s helpers and the sudden (coincidental) added ability of the hammock on the front porch to yell at him as he attempted to check on the fire in the outside oven.
- Cati´s assurances that they didn´t need to place a shovel in front of the oven to hold up the door of it, because she could do it herself, something she didn´t always remember she had agreed to do.
- Past missionary-cooking-with-Casa-Uno advice that stipulates the need to travel all the way back to Casa Uno with the girls or risk them arriving at their house with empty plates and perhaps slightly fuller stomachs. To their credit, rumors surrounding the cases of the missing cookies often conclude that they´re liable to give away a substantial number of cookies, not merely eat them all.

Anyway, copies of this book on tape (cause I´m really feeling like the voice with which it is read is key) should be available in stores near you in... shoot, I can´t think of a time period I could pick that would be humorous. Oh well.

Thanksgiving Update (right before Christmas!)

Dear Readers,

I'd like to take the time to update you on Thanksgiving... even though it's only a week before Christmas! I'm not even going to attempt to justify it either!

As the only people at the Finca that really have much of an interest in celebrating Thanksgiving (it's an American holiday after all!), the missionaries really take it upon themselves to go all out and make the day a fun one for all of us and 50 of our closest friends. Everyone split up and worked in teams on various different foods common to thanksgiving in the states; I elected the pie team. There were only two of us on the team and we had 18 pies to make, so initially it looked slightly intimidating. We'd established that we were going to make seven pumpkin, seven apple, and four pecan pies, and a buying trip to San Pedro Sula the week before insured that (nearly) all of our supplies arrived on time. Unfortunately, due to a translation mishap, that didn't include corn syrup for the pecan pies. We received regular maple syrup instead, so we decided to just mix a bunch of sugar and water on the stove instead. After about eight hours of pie-making the day before (when we finished all seven of our pumpkin pies) and perhaps eight hours the day of, we finished the last of the pecan pies right before we served the pies at the end of dinner. This wasn't without help, derived from several of the retirees and some of our past Finca volunteers that were visiting for the weekend.
My favorite part of the baking process was a stressful moment when our sugar and water mixture failed to actually turn into corn syrup. I just might've panicked and chosen to dump a whole bottle of maple syrup into the pecan pie mixture instead.
Fun fact: That works! As someone jokingly commented, they weren't sure whether they were going to be eating a thanksgiving dinner or a pancake breakfast, but other than the maple smell that filled the house right before the feast, it worked like a charm!

During this time, the rest of the house was busy preparing the rolls, the turkey (s!), the stuffing, the green bean casserole, you name it. Basically everything that we wouldn't be able to have in Honduras that reminded you of Thanksgiving was there, and it only cost about $18 a missionary to buy enough supplies for all of the 60-ish people that came. I suppose that's kinda a lot for one meal, but when it's a once in a year deal, I'd say it was worth it.

During the baking process there was even a scheduled short break for an american flag football game mixed in... during which I played quarterback for one of the teams and scored the game losing touchdown on the last play! We lost 21-14 (or 3-2), but our team had the ball last. My stats included one passing touchdown (a pass of about 5 yards that my receiver (Harrison) did a great job to turn into 60) and one interception to go along with the trick play touchdown reception that ended the game.


I gotta run, so I can't talk about anything more at the present time, but Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas to y'all from the Finca!

So, it turns out that it is much more difficult than I originally thought to make it to a computer and write a blog post down here. En todos modos "down here" is no longer referring to my comfortable language school location of Antigua, Guatemala, but rather the Finca! Our trip to just outside of Trujillo, Honduras went quite smoothly, with very little to note. We briefly stopped in La Ceiba to visit Fase II, where the Finca kids who have graduated and matured enough attend high school. That was a cool introduction to what we have set up there... a look into the future of the kids I'll be working with on a more immediate basis.
[Here you might ask, "oh yeah, Kevin, you mentioned you'd be doing something but weren't sure what yet! What are you doing?" I might respond with: ]
Oh yeah! For those of you who don't already know (which is nearly everybody except my parents and siblings (in fact, it might actually be exactly everybody except for them)), I'll be teaching math and computer classes at the colegio for the coming year. The math classes will be seventh through ninth grades, while I'll be teaching computer classes to first through ninth.

So... this is silly, because I finally decided to type a blog post, but we're currently in the middle of rainy season, it's looking like it's going to rain like crazy on me, and I'm a ten minute walk away from the farm. Plus, I'm using somebody else's computer which I'll have to carry back in the rain if I don't leave real quick. So I'm only gonna say this much and ditch!

I hope all are well back in the states!

Que se vaya bien!

- Kevin

P.S. I have my address! Here it is:

Kevin Mader

Finca del Nino
Apartado Postal #110
Trujillo, Colon
Honduras, Central America
cough- SEND ME MAIL! -endcough
Just in case you get bored enough to send me some snail mail... which I would highly encourage, by the way. Since I have limited access to the internet, I'm going to make a deal with y'all. If you snail-mail me, I will definitely get back to you, because it means that you are committing to the same level of effort to keep in touch with me as I am with you, whereas correspondence via email is so difficult for us at times that I can't guarantee response to everyone. My apologies for this... it's just so hard to get to a computer (with internet) here.

Hey guys!

Remember that time when I had a blog that I was updating often?! Nope, neither do I.

Well never fear! Here I am, still alive and kicking nearly a month after my last post. In the last few weekends we´ve had quite a bit of excitement. What with a tornado knocking the entire city´s power out, the massive amount of rain we had that broke the pipes and left us without any water for an entire day (and then several more evenings that week), the eruption of the Volcan de Fuego (that´s "fire" for you really gringo peeps) over the past weekend (resulting in the evactuation of about 33,000 people) and the arrest of the mayor of Antigua yesterday morning on corruption charges (including stealing multiple million Quetzales from the government), we´ve had our fair share of both natural and unnatural excitement.

This weekend we are also celebrating Guatemala`s independence from España, a celebration the people of Guatemala take far more seriously than we do en los Estados Unidos (if you´re like me, you´re thinking, "Well obviously! Why would people from the US care about Guatemala`s independence?"). Today we participated in a 20 15 14 16(?) km (they kept changing the distance on us) run from a neighboring town that had a couple of double r`s in it (I had to ask the name of the town twelve times and still can´t remember) all the way back to Antigua (while at certain points carrying a torch). Maybe eventually I´ll find a picture of it?

I should also talk a lot about both the retreat the missionaries attended a couple weekends ago and our trip last weekend to Semuc Champey, Lanquin, and Coban, but I´m out of time at the moment... more on that later!

Life as a (really poor) translator!

Dear Y´all,

Good Morning! Kevin here with another update on his experiences in Guatemala! This week has been a bit different than the usual for me, because rather than going to language school the whole week, I´ve been spending some of the days this week going with some doctores de los Estados Unidos a Santa Maria de Jesús, un pueblo cerca de Antigua. Most of the doctors (all from Lubbock, Texas) don´t speak mor´n a lick of Spanish. The organization that is responsible for organizing the even is called Guatemala Sana, and they´re a group that tries to bring doctors from other countries to small towns in Guatemala. From what I can tell, they contacted my language school and asked if they had anyone who could translate for the doctors...  so here I am! The whole week I was almost certainly the least qualified translator, because of the other three translators, one is a girl that works at the school and two are going to be working at the farm with me, but of those two, one is much better in Spanish than I, and the other is a Nurse Practicioner who worked with a hispanic population in DC at some point, so she´s got tons of medical terminology down pat. However, even if I was the last qualified, I did still manage to make some positive contributions, which was quite rewarding. My favorite translations were the ones where the patients only spoken the Mayan language of Kaqchikel. In those situations, we had two people who spoke Kaqchikel and Spanish, so typically the doctor would say, "So... where do you have pain?," I would give a rough estimate of the question in Spanish, the other translator would speak to the patient in Kaqchikel, the patient would respond in Kaqchikel, the translator would tell me in Spanish what she said, and then I would tell the doctor what she said... in theory. There were also some doctors that only spoken Spanish around, but sometimes they could understand other people´s Spanish better than us and would simply say what the other person had in slightly easier terms for us to understand. It reminded me considerably of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Xtbbo_lHqAs. Anyway, that´s been a considerable amount of fun.

In other news, we took a trip to the Volcan de Pacaya about an hour away from Antigua this past weekend, where we climbed up a decent percentage of the way and stopped near the top to take pictures, roast marshmellows (heated by the volcano) and generally explore. I don´t have a camera with me, but whenever I actually manage to get pictures from someone else, I´ll work on puttin´some of ´em up. We all got up at 5 am in order to do this, because we went on a morning trip to avoid all of the massive amounts of rain we normally experience in the afternoons. Sadly, it was ridiculously cloudy that morning anyway... which was sorta unfortunate but also kind of cool to look at.

Anyway, I´d better run cause I only have two minutes left on this computer!

Buenas tardes!

Hola familia y amigos!

Kevin aqui! I´m writing from an internet cafe in Antigua, Guatemala, where I´ve been for just under a week. That´s right, I didn´t die on the trip. I know a lot of you were concerned. So was I. In fact, I did spend the night overnight in a really cold section of the Mexico City airport without a jacket (because I was silly and checked both of mine), and woke up with a cough, but luckily an actual cold never developed and I made it out safely.
Anyway, I´ve successfully been here since last Tuesday, and during the past six days have learned a lot about Guatemala. Since I only have five minutes before I run out of time at the cafe, I´m going to make a list:
1) Guatemala drivers are ridiculous.
2) The entire dealio with the streets is ridiculous... nobody listens to any of the rules of the road... if there even are any?
3) I´m really good at darting across streets rapidly between cars now. I´ll need to remember that´s not how it works in the US.
4) My Spanish needs some work.
5) My Spanish is improving.
6) As far as I can tell, none of the channels down here showed the US Women´s futbol team winning an epic semifinal against Canada. I had to find out from das Internet.
7) Monterrico (The land of rich weeds) is a spectacular black sand beach only two hours away from Antigua, and I very much enjoyed a weekend there.
8) Shoot... I´m running out of time... what else? My host family is awesome! Okay, I´ll add more later. Bye!