En la boca de un dragón
I feel like this is a place that even if I could take out my camera and document it all without fear of having my camera stolen, people still wouldn’t believe it all. Everyone would glance at Gen and I sitting literally on the front windshield of the bus from Cholutecha back to San Lorenzo, wondering why we are dripping with sweat (because apparently, this is where the devil himself resides), and why the bus would allow so many people on (because they work on commission), and why on earth we would subject ourselves to such a ride (we ourselves are not sure), but they still wouldn’t understand.
We spent the last four days in the mouth of a dragon. San Lorenzo is a larger town on the southern coast of Honduras. Mom asked if she could snorkel down there, and I told her if she did she is braver than I, and to let me know what the hell is in that water. For a costal town, the heat is unlike anything I had ever expected. The wind has long stopped visiting San Lorenzo and so the dreadful heat and the water have formed a stench and a warmth reserved solely for this town. And here reside three Peace Corps volunteers. Gen and I, for reasons still unapparent to us, and even after our last night there when our casita flooded and we had no water, and the electricity turned off for no evident reason and we had no fans, want this site for our own. We have no control over our fate, neither of us will be sent here, but we are fighting over it even as I write.
In the midst of the stares we elicit just by being on a bus, and the questions we receive just for having a sun burn, and cat calls we accept and divert just because we are women in a county that believes we serve very few purposes, I have found an exciting independence, and the promise of a sense of self yet to come. After these four days it will be hard to return to the hand holding, lunch being made for me life that training holds, but at least I know and now have seen the light at the end of the tunnel…or rather, what the inside of the mouth of a dragon contains.
We spent the last four days in the mouth of a dragon. San Lorenzo is a larger town on the southern coast of Honduras. Mom asked if she could snorkel down there, and I told her if she did she is braver than I, and to let me know what the hell is in that water. For a costal town, the heat is unlike anything I had ever expected. The wind has long stopped visiting San Lorenzo and so the dreadful heat and the water have formed a stench and a warmth reserved solely for this town. And here reside three Peace Corps volunteers. Gen and I, for reasons still unapparent to us, and even after our last night there when our casita flooded and we had no water, and the electricity turned off for no evident reason and we had no fans, want this site for our own. We have no control over our fate, neither of us will be sent here, but we are fighting over it even as I write.
In the midst of the stares we elicit just by being on a bus, and the questions we receive just for having a sun burn, and cat calls we accept and divert just because we are women in a county that believes we serve very few purposes, I have found an exciting independence, and the promise of a sense of self yet to come. After these four days it will be hard to return to the hand holding, lunch being made for me life that training holds, but at least I know and now have seen the light at the end of the tunnel…or rather, what the inside of the mouth of a dragon contains.
posted by Miriam @ 6:44 PM
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