Immigration Party.

It´s easy to find a person or a group entertaining at certain bright points. You know, the highlights people like to talk about in their week: parties, going out for the weekend, possibly holidays. Thus, to really measure of how fun and interesting a person or group may be it´s best to observe them in a drier, humorless setting; someplace impersonal, soul-less.

An immigration office at 7 a.m. on a Saturday should suffice.

It was a blast. We water & sanitation volunteers had not seen the Health volunteers in three weeks, and the Business crew only briefly two weeks before. People were animated, boisterous even, hugging and slapping hands and telling all kinds of stories. One volunteer´s family takes him to the cockfights every Sunday. Another enumerated the finer points of teaching condom use to highschool students. Many had gone to the beaches in the south. Others have been dealing with chisme, the wildfire gossip that can get truly epic in and between the small towns.

For example, one volunteer had to change host families because the father was getting deported from the US back to Honduras. I know this because a volunteer in my Spanish class was told it BY A COMPLETE STRANGER parked by the highway. These towns are two to three hours apart on the highway, and the fellow in question had no affiliation to the Peace Corps. Talk about being in the public eye.

Hence, I shall reiterate, everything here is my personal & recreational opinion and NOTHING MAY BE TAKEN TO REPRESENT PEACE CORPS POLICY. Also, I am not from New York City, I am not a spy, and I cannot get you a visa.

I think that the reason we were so chipper so early, besides the mid-FBT (Field Based Training) reunion, is most definately the fact that we had all arrived by bus. The typical Honduran bus is tricked out like a upper-middle class suburban wankster´s Honda Civic. All the drivers personalize their buses with flame decals, Jesuchristo Vive in barbed-wire font, and the logos of either the Transformers (Decpticons or Autobots) or the Thundercats (Thundercats HO!) They usually have all the windows blacked out, with shiny chrome hubcaps (I´ve even seen cheap spinners) and surprisingly nice sound systems that blast spanish reggaeton and/or disco. This morning we got The Night Belongs to Us (approximately 6:40 a.m.) It´s Raining Men, and as we rolled up Superfreak.

Welcome to a typical commute into Tegucigalpa.

The other common mode of transportation is the venerable jálon, which starts with a whistle and a wave and ends with the traveller jumping out of the back of a pickup truck, graciously thanking the driver, and apprecaiting how friendly and laid-back most people are here. Barreling down a dirt road piled in the bed of a rusty Datsun pickup with a few of my Peace Corps compañeros, with the warm sun on my face and the wind whipping through my hair, I remember thinking I love this country.