I fell in love today, and then I ate some chicken feet.

It was one of those days, the kind where I felt truly connected to my purpose and felt as if I were exactly where I needed to be (some people think PC volunteers feel like this everyday, believe me, we don´t). My really good day started last Sunday with Amalia and Charlie who live and volunteer here and are quickly becoming good friends of mine. Here is a picture of them and their neighbor (Charlie´s baby) Syra. Amalia is originally from Honduras and Charlie is a good ole´ southern boy from Texas, a little firecracker if you ask me. They (as well as most of us as I am finding out) live next door to a church whose members make everyone within earshot (and further even) aware of their love for God by yelling and singing about it at the top of their lungs, virtually every night. While I personally don´t share their enthusiasm where religion is concerned, I say more power to them, but not Charlie. He threatened to introduce the Hondurans to Willie Nelson on full blast the next time he deems their services too loud! Charlie and Amalia, among other projects, have been working on a project they call Grandma´s Kids. When they first came to help El Porvenir after Hurricane Mitch they stumbled upon some abuelitas (grannies) who were living with their children and grandchildren in dire living conditions. They didn´t have running water, were using the ocean to bath, wash clothes and to relive themselves, roofs falling in on top of them, malnourished, most of the children had TB among other health issues. One girl has epilepsy and is permanently damaged from seizing so profusely in the past as a result of not having the proper medication, at times for 30 minutes straight. Over the past years Amalia and Charlie have secured improved living conditions, provided assistance for means to feed the 7 women and 25 or so children and provided medication to treat many of their ailments. Even still, they could not be considered anything but poverty stricken by any stretch of the imagination. One of the issues is that there is no one to care for the little kids while the women work, so Charlie and Amalia built a daycare. This is the event I attended, the grand opening. And this is where I fell in love. These kids didn´t know me from a hole in the wall, but hugged me, touched me, clung to me and loved me immediately, like I had known them their whole life. The feelings were mutual. Here is a picture of Oscar (as you can tell the picture is compliments of him), he held my hand during the entire ceremony and gazed up at me so lovingly, I was melting. Another one of the many ¨oh yeah, this is why I¨m here¨ moments, which come when I´m not even expecting it, the best time. Expectations, what a relative term, like night and day between here and the United States. Right now my expectations are virtually nonexistent because I haven´t been here long enough to determine them. I´m finding that being in that mindset I am rarely disappointed and often pleasantly surprised, I could get used to that. Here´s a picture of all the kids, their moms and the grandmas. They are standing on a little bridge that connects their yard to the street, before it was built they trudged back and forth through essentially a swamp.

Charlie and Amalia are going back to the states for a couple of months so I told her I would check in on Grandma´s Kids while they were away. The next day I was still high and on my way home from the municipality when 3 of Grandma´s Kids riding a bike (see previous blog entry) started screaming Jessica!! Jessica!!. One of them jumped off, and came charging toward me. I caught him in my arms where he clung with his arms and legs wrapped around my torso like a koala bear. He asked where I was going and when I told him my house and he quickly replied, no you´re coming to my house, grabbed my hand and led the way. Who am I to argue with one of Grandma´s Kids? Originally, I had figured I would come by the house in a week or so to check in, but I found myself back there the very next day. Yes, I do believe in fate. Jose and I got closer to the house and as they saw the Gringa (that would be me) they came charging and screaming my name, 10 or so of Grandma´s Kids. Some had no shirts, some no pants, most had no shoes, some of those babies where even stark naked. One boy, maybe 3 or 4, who asked me no less than 100 questions (and screamed the question at the top of his lungs whenever I asked him to repeat it as if I couldn´t hear rather than couldn´t speak the language), was eating a cacao, a fruit with a bunch of seeds with sort of slimy sour flesh. As he spit out the seeds another little boy picked them up off of the muddy street to suck any juice that was left in the regurgitated seed. One curly dark-haired naked baby sat in the middle of the road, her little butt was caked with mud. They all fought to be the ones underneath my arms on each side, however being surprisingly polite to one another allowing turns to be taken. We talked for a while. They get such a kick out of teaching me Spanish and I feel less inhibited speaking around them than adults. When it was time to go I got 15 hugs (5 other kids had joined the ruckus by that time) and was made to promise to stop by tomorrow, the easiest promise I´ve ever made. I walked home contemplating the circumstances which had been presented; this is the kind of stuff I imagined when I signed up for Peace Corps. I finally feel like there is truly something I can do to help, although I´m not sure exactly what that is yet still, but I´m getting closer everyday. After all of the goodness that had filled my life in the last 24 hours or so I sat down to dinner that night excited to talk to my family about Grandma´s Kids and then…I was served chicken feet, 4 of them, and some of their necks too. Ok, not the worst thing in the world that could´ve happened, this is true, but it was certainly a first for me. I didn´t take a picture out of courtesy to my host mother, I didn´t need to, the image is now conveniently burned into my brain forever. Nonetheless, I did not come all the way here to be some prissy American that doesn´t embrace new experiences so I shoved one of the claws (there are three toes by the way in case you were wondering) into my mouth trying to simply scrape the meat (is there even meat on chicken toes?) with my teeth and then the middle claw broke off into my mouth. Yep, that did it, I was done, I had been a good sport and now I was done. My host mother had pretty much the same reaction she had had with the fish (see previous blog entry) and gobbled up the remaining 3 feet along with the other pathetically partially eaten limb, what remained of my feeble attempt at reaching new cultural horizons.

Here´s one of the streets on my way to work.