One would think that after 2 years of living abroad, I would have been prepared to start my new life in Honduras. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. It is true, there are a lot of similarities across the board in developing nations. We assumed things would have been comparable to our lifestyle to which we had grown accustomed to in the Philippines. That was shattered by our first week in country.
We were already accustomed to “Filipino Time” where you can cancel anything due to rain, diarrhea, or a curse. ”Honduran Time” is slightly different, here people take one month holidays for Christmas and it takes about 2 full weeks after the already generous holiday to get back into full swing. Since we have been in country, the biggest challenge has also been balancing an American mentality in regards to deadlines and correspondence while following the local pace of life as well. We are not fully immersed in one culture or another. At least in the Philippines we had the chance to let go of the idea of punctuality all together!
Surprisingly enough, language barriers have not been as challenging as cultural barriers. As our friend Tania once said, “It isn’t that they don’t understand what you are saying, they don’t get why you are saying it”. They may understand the words well enough but don’t understand the concept. This is something that we run into time and time again. These past 6 months in Honduras have absolutely been the most challenging in my life, I have had more nervous breakdowns than I care to mention. But the breakdowns are less and less, we are adapting and once it all becomes easy I am sure it will be time to leave. But until then, I will try to document our emotions, our failures and our successes.
