Monday March 22, 2010

I forgot to tell you about something that happened on Friday in my nivalacion class.

So Fridays are casual here in Honduras (as in many work places in the United States) and I was wearing jeans, a white polo shirt and my awesome new Abundant Life Christian School warm-up jacket. I was giving a new vocabulary list to my kids, “clothes,” and was demonstrating what a jacket was in English by showing them my jacket. While doing this I walked towards the back of the room and unzipped the front of my jacket as I continued to repeat “J-A-C-K-E-T.” While I did this two girls who were sitting in the row I was walking in freaked out. They suddenly went off saying something really quickly in Spanish and one of them jumped out of her seat and moved towards me. She proceeded to reach at the collar of my white polo shirt, which was now visible since I had unzipped my jacket, grab, and then throw, for American standards, a rather large spider at the window of the classroom. Now when I say for American standards anybody in their right mind, in a typical home in the United States, would freak out at not only the size, but also the scariness of this spider. It was about average for a spider down here in Honduras.

I am not usually a guy who gets all freaked out by spiders. In fact, when I was in Dallas I followed a tarantula around the driving range at Dallas National for a good 10 minutes. But to have this size of a spider crawling on the collar of my polo shirt and not know it was there, that freaked me out a little bit. I came to the conclusion that it must have made its way into my jacket during the night. I hang it up on a nail in my bedroom and it must have made its way into the jacket while I slept unknowingly. When I put it on Friday morning it must have just been hanging out until its unfortunately appearance in my nivalacion class (fortunate for my sake—no spider bites).

Anyway, another Honduras story told. I hope you enjoyed it and watch out for spiders.