Erin Miller

Last weekend I escaped to Utila once again. Utila is one of the three major islas de la bahia off the coast of Honduras. I spent a very busy two and half days getting my Open Water Diver certification. I started the adventure partly out of an act of love, to learn one of my boyfriend’s favorite hobbies, but I have since become addicted. I learned all the basics, how to set my gear up and put it on (arguably one of the hardest parts), how to calculate nitrogen levels in my body, how to recover my regulator, how to establish a shaky buoyancy, how to do a controlled emergency assent, and most difficult of all, to breath through my regulator while recovering my mask. I have no idea why it is so hard to breath through ones mouth while you take your mask off, but it is apparently challenging for lots of people, or at least that is what my instructor told me to make me feel like less of a wimp.

Bay Islands College of Diving
When I told the instructor at the school that I had to finish the certification by the early ferry on Tuesday to get back for a meeting in my town he said that it was the first time in 9 months that he had heard of someone having to get anywhere for a meeting at a specific time. The meeting was going to be held at the Centro de Salud to discuss the Albergue and methods to help my work continue there. I got back to La Esperanza just in time to take a shower and get to el Centro to learn that the meeting, in typical Central American fashion, had been cancelled. It was the day in honor of workers here, the first of May, and therefore the meeting was cancelled but has not been rescheduled yet. Apparently the entire world, including most of Europe and even Pakistan, celebrates the first of May to honor the working class. It is too communist a holiday for the States.

Sunset from the watertower on Utila


Coast of Utila
The biggest news since I got back was getting to see a birth at the hospital this week. It was basically too amazing an experience crammed into too short an amount of time to really be able to absorb it all. There are only two delivery beds in the hospital and by the time the woman walked from the labor room to delivery and got herself settled on the bed, she had one contraction, and then on the next one the nurse told her to push. The doctor hadn’t yet arrived but the nurse told me to tie a mask on her face because she was going to deliver the baby. The nurse caught the baby just as I finished tying the mask.
I have been busy since I returned getting caught up at the hospital, buying food and giving my charlas at the Albergue, and leading the diabetics club. Or at least it feels like I have been busy. I wonder if I have just adjusted the amount I feel like I should get done in a day to the pace of life here. I sometimes look up at the clouds and feel like they are moving really quick and then wonder if maybe they just seem like they are moving fast because everything here is moving slowly. We have had continual brown outs and rolling blackouts since I got back and that hasn’t helped with the productivity level. I think that I also feel like things are moving fast as I realize that my time here is winding down. My parents arrive next week for a trip to the beach and then to do some free doctoring in areas that need it most. And my boyfriend arrives in 25 days (but who’s counting?) to enjoy my last ten days in Honduras with me. I have been trying to take some time to recognize and enjoy all of the things that I will miss about Honduras, like five dollar three-course meals (I think those will be hard to come by in New York City), oranges with salt for sale for a nickel on every street corner, licuados, women carrying tortillas, vegetables, and lord-knows what else on their heads as they walk to the market, being able to speak Spanish whenever I want by just walking into the kitchen, people getting around in wooded carts pulled by mules, bananas for sale right off the stem of the tree, men wearing cowboys hats because they are actually cowboys, not because they are making a fashion statement, people hauling wood in carts pulled by two oxen tied together at the horns, baleadas, not being expected to bath everyday, strong Honduran coffee always waiting on the kitchen table, fifty cent mangoes and fifty cent pound bags of strawberries, unripened mangoes in chili sauce and salt, and I think I might even miss the roosters singing as the faintest light enters the morning sky.
I guess that is all for now, I am going to try to get a few other things done, perhaps even try to bathe, before the power cuts again.