"Teach me Lord, teach me Lord, to wait"

The other day while waiting, a song started going through my head:

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength

They shall mount up with wings as eagles

They shall run and not be weary

They shall walk and not faint

Teach me Lord; teach me Lord, to wait”

Although the song uses one definition of waiting, the last line rung true for me using the more common definition of waiting. “Teach me Lord, to wait.” I spend a good deal of time waiting (example: meeting was supposed to start at 8:00; we arrived at 9:15; the other attendees didn’t arrive until after 10:30, and the meeting began at 11:00), and sometimes get impatient and bored. I have made a list of things I have enjoyed doing while waiting:

1. Making lists. I have already posted a couple of lists (things in Honduras that make me look twice; things I am learning), and I am in the process of making more (7 underway!). I daresay I will post more lists before I return to Canada.

2. Watching old women scold men. This is particularly fun if the scoldee has a sense of humour and cowers under his scolding.

3. Finding out how much of something fits in the back of a truck. In this case, “something” can be cows, bags of cement (which tell you not to do drugs), people, sacks of recyclables three times taller than the truck itself, furniture, sand, manure, trees…

4. Watching my thermometer. I thoroughly enjoy this. Watching the temperature change as we go up a mountain, or as we move from sun to shade, or night to day. I am keeping track of the maximum and minimum temperature each day. The lowest was 11.9C, and the highest was 23.7C.

5. Watching animal/human interactions. Chickens casually stroll into the kitchen when the door is open, only to be shoed out again with the bottom half of the door closed behind them. So the chicken flies back in! Dogs happily lie in the sun in the road, and refuse to move until a vehicle is practically upon them. Goats don’t like going for walks; they prefer to go where they please. Lassoing a cow is a challenge for a learner, and a pasture full of 12 cows with their new owners who are learning how to lasso them is a picture of chaos.

6. Identifying which animals have passed based on what they have left behind. Since the rainy season has ended, the streets are getting full of animal droppings. I am able to identify 6 animals based on their excrement (dog, cat, cow, horse, goat, chicken).

7. Making family trees. Families here are generally large and well inter-connected. To help me keep track of people, I have two main family trees underway (my host family, and the family with whom I eat). And yes, the two families are related by marriage!

8. Finding the second tallest person in the room. It’s never hard to identify the tallest person – in La Campa, it´s always me. The second tallest person is harder to spot, especially if the men are wearing their hats, which adds an inch or two to their height.

9. Catching glimpses of telenovelas. Telenovelas are soap operas, and are always intensely dramatic, romantic, and ridiculous. My favourite so far is named “Sea of Love.” I have never watched an entire episode, and I don’t think I want to.

10. Naming our rooster. I was lying awake one morning, waiting for the rooster to calm down enough that I could sleep, and decided that he deserved a name. This rooster likes to roost in the tree just outside my door, so that whenever he wakes up, I do too. I have named him Maurice Aureliano. I’m not sure where I got the name Maurice from, but Aureliano comes from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Aureliano is a character in the book that has 17 sons by 17 different women, and each woman names her son Aureliano. I can see distinct similarities between Aureliano and the rooster…!