...which, it's important to note, is still Honduras for Hondurans, too

One thing I have to remind myself of frequently when down here is that, even though there are so many inconveniences to life in Honduras that make me wish I were just back home, I have a "back home." I have an address in the States I can send stuff to if I want to take advantage of a sale on Amazon or order a limited edition pressing of a record or t-shirt, knowing that I'll be able to pick it up when I go home in the next few months. I won't be here forever. Inconveniences down here are temporary.

Meanwhile, for my students, this life IS their life. This IS their "back home," inconveniences and all. Just because they deal with them every day doesn't make them less frustrating. Take today, for example. (By the way, it was the first day of school today.) Every year, the seniors make a grand entrance at the opening assembly. This year, the seniors had an elaborate plan of riding in on fire trucks and military vehicles. Yes, riding INTO the school grounds, with music blaring and yelling while hanging off the sides. Well, besides the fact that they only obtained one fire truck and had a short chain of random pick-ups behind, when the seniors had been planning this they didn't realize the school would randomly start building a large awning thing over the main entrance of the school, making the prospect of driving anything beyond the parking lot impossible. This meant all the students had to walk down to see them drive into the parking lot, siren blaring. However, because of the narrow nature of the walkway from the entrance up to the school buildings, only the few students in the front had a fair view, through the construction, of 70 seniors dancing and waving their arms. The whole "entrance" was hardly one, and I'm guessing many of the seniors are pretty disappointed that they were forced into a lackluster one.

So I may get frustrated, but at least I don't have to deal with the issues of Honduras as a simple fact of life beyond this year.