The Lessons of Full Integration

Sorry to everyone for the lack of updates lately. I have been extremely busy as of late and the internet at my office has been non-existent. The town festival of Camasca just finished this past Sunday so hopefully life will calm down a little bit. The festival is a 5 day event which celebrates the patron saint of our town which is St. Peter. I actually missed the first three days of the festival because I attended a conference in Siguetapeque, a larger city about 7 hours from Camasca. The conference was a workshop on environmental education and the best ways to promote environmental conservation in the schools of Honduras. I really enjoyed the workshop and am working to start a local environmental club with the a nearby elementary school and a teacher that seemed initially interested.

The town festival created numerous opportunities to integrate myself further into the community, especially into the segment of Camasca that is most reserved. I have been accepted by everyone in Camasca with open arms, but the older men from my community have been extremely reserved in talking or treating me like a local member, this includes my host dad. This treatment all changed due to a series of events that I wish I could claim credit for planning.

The process of gaining full acceptance by the men of my community began in the weeks leading up to the festival. About two weeks before the festival started the entire town began the process of general maintenance. There are three neighborhoods in Camasca and I live in Barrio El Campo which is farther outside the center point of the town. I was unaware of the plan to re-dig all the drainage ditches along the streets in my neighborhood and cut back all the vegetation along the road. As I walked back from basketball practice on Saturday morning my entire neighborhood was out with shovels and machetes. Of course I offered to help and spent the next five hours digging ditches along the road and hauling trees to the nearby ravine. I have done tree work with Breiding Landscaping so I was thoroughly impressed by the pace with which these men cut down entire trees with a machete. I actually have improved dramatically in with my machete chopping and was cutting the grass along the roads while kneeling. As I was macheteing (not a word) I felt all these little pricks on my right knee. As I pulled my knee out of a dirt mound I realized that I had invaded an ant kingdom and the little pricks were ant bits that were now attached all over my knee. As my knee began to grow we finally neared the end of our road maintenance around 1 oclock.  

As I head home the mayor of my town asked me if I wanted to go help some people that were working on the soccer field. I told him I would definitely come after I ate lunch, but was convinced that we would only be there for a maximum of 1 hour. Of course I spent the next six hours digging two large ditches to place a drainage pipe under the soccer field. After we finished refilling the ditches we spent the next hour lobbing shovels full of dirt from the bordering mountain onto the wet parts of the field. Thank god for my landscape experience because I truthfully thought I was going to die at several parts of the day but just kept going. After we finished the long day of work the mayor of the town became my best friend. I walked for the next week with a limp, had nasty blisters on my hands, and could not bend my right knee for two days. However, all of the men that worked on the project with me instantly talked to me as I walked through the streets like we had gone to St. V grade school together.

However, my full acceptance into the male population of Camasca was not actually completed until the last day of the festival. On that fateful Sunday I went to a makeshaft rodeo stadium outside of the town to watch a ranchero musical group and professional bull riders perform that came from El Salvador for the festival. Halfway through the event I went to talk to some guys I work with that were standing next to the bull riders. Of course one of the bull riders asked me if I wanted to ride a bull and me thinking it was a joke or at least not possible said yeah I would ride a bull. Of course within 30 minutes the band leader had announced to the crowd that I was about to ride the next bull. Within 5 minutes someone had attached spurs to my boots, shin guards to my legs, and placed a baseball helmet on my head. After taking a swig of some local moonshine I stepped into the little boxed in area where my bull awaited me wondering how this happened.

As I hung above the bull straddling him from the fence I cursed my Spanish and acute ability to find myself in interesting, to say the least, situations. The guy in charge of the gate asked me if I was ready, and after exclaiming the F word at the top of my lungs I sat down on the bull and hooked in the spurs, which did not make the bull happy. Even worse the man with the electrical poking device tapped the back side of the bull, followed by the gate opening. Now I have to explain a key detail before the program started the announcer stated that 8 seconds may seem like a short time but for a bull rider is a mark that they try and reach. For the next ten seconds of my life, which definitely proved that all time is relative, I hung on for dear life and successfully was accepted with open arms by every member of my community. I will admit that I used two hands to last for ten seconds while the pros only used one, but I have had to deny numerous reports throughout the town that I was a bull rider in the states. And don’t worry mom, the experience was my first and last bull I will ever mount.

So I guess the moral of the story is the best recipe for acceptance in a machismo mountain side Honduran culture is hard manual labor, an ant hill, and mounting a bull for ten seconds, but then again it was all an accident.