Three

As week three encerrada comes to a close, I thought I'd give y'all some novedades from the past week. While I was writing my update last Saturday, we got news of new regulations to be followed during the curfew. Each person can leave their house one day a week between 9am and 3pm to go grocery shopping or to the bank. Whether you can go out on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday is determined by the last digit of your government-issued ID: 1, 2, 3 on Monday; 4, 5, 6 on Wednesday; and 7, 8, 9, 0 on Friday. No movement is allowed on the other four days of the week. Those who go out when it's not their turn risk having their vehicle decommissioned or worse. So, here's my take on how the first week under these rules went.

The lines for the grocery stores and banks are ridiculous. Jenny and Rudi went shopping yesterday at one of the grocery stores that actually lets you go inside, even though it's more expensive, so they wouldn't have to wait outside in a line for an hour at least, but a lot of average folks don't have the luxury of that choice. And the hot season is really kicking into gear... it's getting up into the mid-90s pretty regularly with a heat index at about 105. This is not the season of the year where you want to make a habit of standing outside for hours! (I mean, you rarely want to be outside for longer than you absolutely need to in SPS... as I can attest to from my heat-exhaustion-induced low-grade fever nap I took after our four-hour outdoor foray back in August.)

From some of the footage I've seen on the news channel my host parents watch, there are traffic jams behind the checkpoints where police check IDs to make sure people are following the rules. In my opinion, it seems a little nonsensical to condense traffic in stores and public areas to three days a week... wouldn't it be better if people were spread out over more days so there wouldn't be so many people in one place at once, even if there are 6 feet between people when they're lining up? And what a great idea to have a couple police officers touching every single one of the IDs of everyone in a long line of cars 🙄

Life didn't change too much for me between this past week and the one before, except I think I'm getting better at being gracious with myself? I'm trying to do my self-work in such a way that I can maintain it cuando regresemos to "normal" work patterns (the subjunctive mood is definitely needed in this case).

Maybe subjunctive is my mood over the past few weeks.

One of the things I've learned being in Honduras is to feel more comfortable thinking about the future in more uncertain terms. (I've alluded to this before but haven't directly addressed it.) Language is a big factor, since the prominence of the subjunctive in speech makes a non-native speaker like me really pay attention to the difference between things we do know and those we don't (e.g. cuando llegué en Honduras en Agosto vs cuando regrese a los EEUU en Octubre). Even short term plans that we might not even label as "plans" in English, such as nos vemos ("see you later" or "we'll see each other") is often accompanied by a si Dios quiere ("if God wills"). I can only imagine how, for a native speaker, this way of expressing concepts must be so ingrained in their way of thinking that there's an inherent ease with uncertainty. Even though I still feel much more comfortable expressing myself in English, there are now some things I feel like I can't fully express without using Spanish... cuando regresemos a trabajar en la oficina being one of them.

I wonder if being immersed in Spanish—and in a culture full of people for whom thinking about time and plans in this way is the air they breathe—has made me, mentally, somewhat more prepared and comfortable with the weirdness, uncertainty, and discomfort of this time. It may not be the air I breathe, but it's the water I swim in.