Home Away from Home

The buses rumble through the iron gates of the school around 4 pm, and immediately everyone gets to the task of arranging the sleeping quarters.

The visiting CURE team is lodged at the San Marco High School. Three long, low, single-story buildings serve as our dormitories. Each building is divided into six or seven identical classrooms, lined up end to end. The construction is simple -- concrete block walls form the shell, concrete walls separate the classrooms. The windows are large. There is no glass, only reinforced steel bars, wire mesh, and horizontal wooden louvers to close against the rain. The floors are tiled, the walls decorated with colorful original paintings by the students.

I was advised at the airport to approach Dr. Bill Waring about reserving a place in the room he occupies. He has the reputation of accumulating a cadre of relatively quiet sleepers -- exactly what a writer needs. Bill instantly agreed to let me move in, even though it meant creating one of the most crowded dorms (nine beds). And the very first night, it is clear that the advice I'd gotten was good.

We arrange the beds in two rows, along the concrete walls. Over each row we string two lengths of clothesline for suspending our individual mosquito nets and a fifth line down the center aisle, for hanging wet towels and clothes. A table is found for our daily 5-gallon jug of drinking water, and between each bed we squeeze a school chair -- the kind with an attached desk surface -- to serve as a night stand. Then it is out to the truck to unload suitcases and backpacks and arrange our living spaces.

All this takes less than two hours, and with good reason. To the surprise of all of us new to Honduras (and accustomed to daylight savings time), the sun sets here at about 6:30, and darkness falls soon after 7 pm. With no functional electric lights in our classroom/dorm rooms, everything that isn't accomplished by daylight has to be finished by flashlight or left for the next day.

There is just enough time after the move-in for a brief devotional meeting and an official welcoming from our co-Host, Ruth Castro, Executive Director of CURE International Honduras (who had met us and run interference for us at the airport), and Reverend Dan Hans, who co-directs the program with Dan Castro, Ruth's husband. Then it is on to supper and our introduction to the kind of simple fare that will be our staple for the duration: rice, beans, cooked vegetables, and fruit.

Despite everyone's long day, people sit for hours afterward in the school courtyard and outside the dormitories, chatting, laughing, and reuniting with old friends. But I'd hardly slept on the plane flights, and once my stomach is full, my exhaustion gets the best of me.

I opt for a shower -- an interesting operation when water is in critically short supply (more on this another day) -- and then, for the first time in my life, I crawl into bed under a mosquito net. I read by flashlight for a few minutes, but soon turn out the light. It is then that I realize the netting is too low. It brushes my nose and forehead if I nove. But I am too tired to care. It will wait until morning.