...right?

Apart from the faces in front of me in class and the vendors passing by nearly all hours of the day, yelling out their incomprehensible pitches* advertising their wares - I still have no idea what "Ohhhh-WAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY-LAAAAAHHHHHHS!" are, nor have I been able to hope to decode "Rrrraaahh-lay-mo-comp-a-toy," and I still think that the woman on her motor scooter with the milk crate lashed to the back is just saying "Adiooooos!!" - it would be very easy to forget that I'm in Honduras.

I have hardly left my house this week, and it's not because of the political unrest. In fact, if you've been keeping up with the news, both sides seem to be relaxing their stance, and although things seem to be moving in the direction of Mel being reinstated, which is not ideal, hopefully he'll come to his senses and realize that he has no hope of turning himself into the Hugo Chavez of Honduras and he'll finish out the last 4 months of his elected presidency in sanity and without delusion.

No, I've been staying home because I'm trying to get myself to work harder. I have become rather apathetic toward my planning, and I guess I'm trying to remove rewards (i.e., going out, doing other stuff) to encourage more diligence, but I'm finding many ways to procrastinate on the Internet.

This procrastination has led to more ways in which Honduras does not seem like Honduras for me. I have taken great lengths to feel like I am still abreast of many goings-on back in the states. I've "watched" nearly every Tigers game of the past week through MLB's GameDay feature on its website. I podcast my favorite NPR shows, and stream Michigan Radio on Saturdays when I can and when the Internet is working properly for me. I almost religiously check my various music news blogs, wired.com, npr.org, mlive.com (more occasionally, usually to see how the high school football teams did each Friday night - yes, I'm a HS football junkie?), and several other blogs I associate with life back home. I downloaded a program that veils my Honduras IP address and allows me to access supposedly U.S. only services such as Pandora music streaming, although the TV network websites see through my ploy and still thwart me. Fortunately, cable down here includes NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX, as well as ESPN and some news networks. I do crosswords from a book, and people brought down plenty of pleasure reading books. I really don't have to feel like I'm in Honduras if I don't want to.

Obviously, this isn't the best attitude to take. I should be embracing being down here, but I still really haven't. I still would truly rather be in West Michigan. The lack of work ethic that manifested itself early on (largely, I feel, due to a lack of direction provided from the school that's caused me to largely shut off that I still feel exists) is obviously still affecting me. I still admit I like my students and am starting to take a real interest in how they perform (on the other hand, many of them don't seem to care themselves how they perform), and maybe it's incredibly selfish of me to still strive toward home and away from where those students are, not to mention where God has put me, but that's still something I struggle with.

*I will attempt to make sound recordings of these people coming past sometime while I'm down here. I would love for some collaboration in figuring these things out from my Spanish-speaking readers.