Portón

Hey everyone! Wow…. sorry about the lack of blogs, we are still in Honduras (amazingly enough). We have been in and out of Danlí lately and not had a lot going on work wise (this is driving me crazy). It is Monday morning at 7:30 while I am writing this. I have to go to find some guys to ask them a question about a design I am working on for a water system today and then go to a meeting at the mayor’s office. I am not exactly sure what the meeting is about but I got invited so I am going, and taking Annie with me so that I have a chance of understanding everything that goes on. My Spanish is getting slowly better and I can now understand all of the major themes in most conversations but I occasionally miss important details or fail to explain myself very well so when I can, I take Annie with me and then after the meeting we have to have a debriefing to make sure I got all the information.

So for lack of anything better to blog about Annie suggested I blog something about life here in Honduras. We live in a pretty big city so we were only allowed to live in certain neighborhoods in town. These neighborhoods in Danlí are very typical of most Central American neighborhoods in that they are surrounded by a wall or a iron fence topped with razor wire, barbed wire, broken glass bottles, or an electric fence. We have an electric fence on top of a concrete block wall. The electric fence is actually kind of annoying, it uses electricity for one and it makes our house stand out too much…like I should hang a sign outside that says “DO NOT FEED THE GRINGOS”. Our house is odd in that we are the only family living behind our wall. Most places have at least two families (always siblings or parents + an assortment of other random relatives) living behind the wall. We also have a big green “portón” or door that opens to the outside. The portón is big enough to pull a car through and is the only entrance to our little compound.

Our big green portón

The portón has caused some funny scenarios. First, it is the only way into our compound (a huge design flaw). When we were first looking to rent this house we committed to rent it even though we hadn’t seen behind the wall yet because at that point you couldn’t get inside the portón. Some one had run into the portón with their car and it was mangled to a point that it wouldn’t open, so no one had entered our little compound for over a year, there was no way in and the electric fence was still on. Side note - no one had actually ever lived in this house before, it was built 2 years ago with “remesas” which is the name for checks sent down from the States and the lady never came back to Honduras. This is quite common…a lot of communities have large American-looking houses with no one living in them or that are unfinished. People send money from the states to build a big house and then they either get deported and the remesas run out or they get citizenship and never come back to the house they had built. Back to the portón stories…people have to knock on the big green door or ring the doorbell if they want to find us which means we don’t have to let them in. We can instead just yell over the top (¡¿Quién?! = “Who is it?!”) to see who it is first. For example, when the Jehovah’s witnesses come you can just pretend that you don’t speak Spanish. Just yesterday the Mormons came over (they send ladies here) and I opened the door and I could tell they wanted to come in but I just didn’t open the door far enough and they were stymied (I was nice though, the Mormon church is right next door so I didn’t want to be rude and pretend to not know Spanish, best not to piss off the neighbors, plus it was a good opportunity to practice a little Spanish). An early morning portón visit (we woke up at 7 am on a Saturday morning to the doorbell) was the nice pulpería owner from down the street. (A pulpería is a little store run out of your house that sells mainly junk food, some basic staples, soda and beer). Anyway, she wanted our 5 empty beer bottles back because the bottle guy was coming to pick up empties later that morning. Nothing like being woken up on an early Saturday morning and having to look around for empty beer bottles while the neighborhood pulpería owner waits outside your portón. Another early morning portón story…a few Sundays ago I was away and some guys stopped by really early in the morning (6:30) looking for me. They were going on a hike in a protected area that Annie and I had hiked with them several months ago and wondered if I wanted to go with them again. Annie answered to portón in her pjs and found a truckload of middle-aged guys looking for me.

We desperately need one of those peepholes!